My Career Voyage! Charting The Course

By Patty Edwards Shaver
MCV Career Development Facilitator

An electronic resume can be scanned from a hard copy or pasted into an online form or e-mail and can be read by any word processor, operating system or e-mail program. It is saved to a database where an employer, using key words, can search for candidates who possess specific qualifications. Resumes containing key words that match the employer’s key words will be found. Therefore, it is very important to use appropriate key words when writing a resume.

Formatting is critical when creating an electronic resume. In order for an electronic resume to be processed correctly, the following rules apply:

• all text must be left justified, do not use indents or tabs
  
• no underlining, or bold or italic type – instead, use capitalized letters to emphasize words
  
• no bullets – use other characters, like asterisks, dashes or plus signs instead
  
• no curly quote marks – use straight quote marks
  
• no lines or images
  
• keep a look out for hyphens or other characters that touch and add a space in between them
  
• save the document as a plain text (.txt) file
  
• e-mail the file to yourself, or someone else, to test the file before e-mailing it to the employer

When e-mailing an electronic resume:

• paste it directly into the e-mail window
  
• type the job number, job title, or job target keywords into the subject line
  
• send a Word version of the resume as an attachment.

Plain text resumes look rather plain. They were not created for human eyes to see. By creating an original resume that you use for presentational purposes, and is easy to reformat to the above guidelines, will help to save time as you tweak your resumes to targeted positions. Also, keep an electronic resume on hand so you can easily copy and paste the text into online forms and e-mail. Following these suggestions will increase the chances of your resume being matched to a potential employer.