Hello Dopers,
In a mild search for a new career path I stumbled upon a prospective employer that asked me to please send a text (ASCII) or HTML version of my resume.
Well, I don’t exactly know what they want. Should I build a nice dazzling web page and send it to them?
Thanks for fighting back my ignorance.
Why didn’t you ask him exactly what he wants? So many people don’t really know what they are asking for even when it sounds like they do.
My guess is that the guy may not want to open an attachment so you can paste your resume into an e-mail, or if you want to send a file, you can paste it into notepad and save the file as .txt. If you work with MSWord, you can save it as an .html file from “file” “save” and picking the file type out of the menu at the bottom of the save screen. But, without knowing what he expects to receive, you’re bound to look like an idiot if you do it wrong.
All they are asking for is that you save it in the universal formats. They won’t need the application you created it in to read it.
You can do both from the “Save As” function in Word.
They are probably asking you to do that so that a machine can read it. That is very common these days. It goes into a database for future recruitment.
However, I have never encountered the HTML request from hundreds of submissions that I have done. They usually ask for Word and occassional just plain text.
Well, I am sure they know what they want.
Here is an intresting Job
This is not position I am going for but all the postings ask for the same kind of resume.
Yea I Googed it. Of course, Hah!
Just looking for answers from some Ignorance Fighting Dopers.
Basically they don’t want to pay the Microsoft tax just to find out you enjoy swimming and badminton. What they want is a plain, typed-words-only file with your education and job history, etc., but no weird colourful fonts or triply-embedded excel spreadsheets.
For plain text, just copy/paste your current resume in to Notepad, and play around with tabs and spaces a bit until it looks as good as the format will allow.
For a long time we wanted text resumes only, to be pasted into the form. I can’t imagine why anyone would want html. Just send them text, and be sure the formatting is good.
Bah! Using a word processor to generate HTML documents is for wimps. I use notepad and put the tags in myself!
(Well, okay, actually I do this because MS Word puts in a lot of extraneous tags that only work right when viewed in MS Internet Explorer. But knowing a little about HTML’s basic tag structure can come in handy, even in situations where you’d least expect it.)
Do not use MS Word to produce an HTML file. It generates a bunch of junk that only displays properly in IE. If your prospective employer isn’t using IE, then they’ll get annoyed with you, which isn’t a good way to make a first impression.
I recommend plaintext over HTML. I think the point is to be able to search your resume quickly and automatically.