I’m going to be sending in my resume to an organization today that requests everything via e-mail. Obviously, I want the resume itself to be Word formatted, so it doesn’t come out jibberish.
But do I put my cover letter in the e-mail, or send it as another attachment?
I’ve always put the cover letter as an attachment, because it’s most likely that they will be printed out and stashed somewhere. Putting the cover letter in Word makes it look better on paper.
In the text of the message, say “Please see attached cover letter and resume” or something.
'Course, I have a shitty job, so what do I know?
That’s far from obvious!
Did they specifically request it in MS-Word format? Do you know what version they are using? Do you want them to be able to look at the revisions you’ve made? (MS-Word format saves a lot more information than what is visible in the printed document. Word metadata can even include text from documents you just happened to have open at the same time.)
If you absolutely must send it as a Word document, save it as the earliest version available-- that’ll strip out most of the document’s history, and prevent it from having skewed layout or long strings of garbage characters (or stuff you’ve actually deleted) if they happen to have an earlier version of Word than you do.
Better still, send it as an .rtf or .html file – that way you can use layout and still be confident that you know how it’s going to appear to the person receiving it. Word is great for sending nice-looking print resumes, but unless they give clear, specific instructions, ie; “Send resume as attached MS Word 2002 file,” don’t take any chances with word. A document authored in the latest version of Word is not necessarily going to be readable if the office is still using Word 97. And lots of offices are.
Larry, thanks. I forgot to run MetaData before I sent it. I just did, and nothing was changed except the Author/Owner bits. That is something I need to remember in the future, though.
I’m going to disagree with this. I spent many years in HR at various companies, and currently work in IT supporting HR and Finance.
Large organizations that use automated applicant tracking systems turn emailed resumes into text files (and often hard-copy resumes, too, via OCR scanner). These text files go into a database. The “original” resume is almost never printed out; rather, what is given to the interviewing manager is either a printed copy or a forwarded email based on the text file in the applicant tracking database. (Often, an image of the scan is retained, but due to bandwidth considerations these were never emailed.) In fact, in one department I worked for, the original email was stripped of its attachment, and hard copy resumes were shredded.
In these cases, it is strongly preferable, from the applicant standpoint, to attach the resume in .txt format, or to put the resume in the plaintext body of the email. This gives you total control over the format. In my experience, people whose resumes came out as near-gibberish due to spacing (too much or too little) and other problems were less likely to get interviews, because the manager didn’t want to puzzle out whether this paragraph was supposed to go under skills and that other paragraph was supposed to be with objectives or whatever.
You may want to call the company to ask how they’ll process your resume, so you know what to do with it.
No one’s mentioned PDF?
I create PDFs of manuals I write at work all the time, from FrameMaker, and it can also be done from Word. BUT - bear in mind we have the whole Acrobat package, so I’m not sure if you can download a PDFwriter plug-in for free.
All of my future CVs will be done in word, printed to .ps file using Distiller as the printer driver, and then made into PDF files with Distiller. (And, under the “Open” options, “Fit to window”.)
But I’m a tech writer. I’m extremely picky about these things.
Two years ago, none of the applicant database systems I was aware of could interpret PDFs. One company would print it and scan it, and then dump the printout; the other would either ignore it as an unreadable file or email the applicant back for a different format depending on how busy the admin was. I can’t say for sure what the situation today is.
I would have sent the cover letter and resume as one Word document, with a brief summary of acheivements and skills in the e-mail.
Good luck!
Oh, if it’s going into a database, then skip the PDF. I was just assuming a real, live person would be getting the resume. The OP didn’t specify.
As one who gets a lot of resumes (and more importantly, looks at resumes and hires people), I recommed Word as the format, unless you’re specifically told otherwise. (Some will request it in text).
If I get a resume in text, I’ll look at it, and try to be fair. But in honesty, when you get a lot of resumes, one with some formatting will come across as a lot stronger, as you can emphasize the strengths you want to much better.
I try to open others I get in other formats, but honestly if one click doesn’t open it, it’s immediately discarded. Doesn’t matter who’s fault it was, my computer, your formatting, the direction of the wind… the important thing is that the resume doesn’t get looked at.
Whatever you do, don’t put it in something like PDF or even worse a non-standard format like word perfect or quark or troff or some crazy nonsense, as everywhere you apply will put it into a searchable database, and those’ll never work there, eliminating you from being culled from that database.
Where the cover letter is really doesn’t matter to me. It could be the first page in a three page doc you send me (the other two your resume), it could be a seperate doc, it could be the text in the email. Honestly, I rarely read those. Hmmm. Having said that, I realize that putting it in the text of the email is better, as I’ll be more likely to read it. Make sure it’s short, two paragraphs at the most, and use plenty of bullets.
Short cover letter in the email - two, three paragraphs at most. I used to attach the letter as an additional page in my CV document, but it became clear that nobody really cared that much. I’d also worked at a bank where I prepared the candidate CVs for the bankers to review - they only wanted the CV, and binned all of the letters.
Attach CV as a Word document - rightly or wrongly, it seems to have become a de facto standard in most large organisations and recruitment agencies.
Tips I’ve learned: the version of Word you save it in doesn’t seem to matter so much but don’t use any fancy techniques or formatting beyond bold/italic/font size. I once had an agency that couldn’t contact me, since I’d put my “admin” details in a text box on the first page, and their version of Word “lost” the box. I also try to stick to the most common fonts - Arial, Times New Roman etc - since a missing font can cause some hideous results.
You create the resumé in the word processor of your choice and then print to PDF and attach the PDF unless they specifically request Word or plain text. In the former case you attach your resumé in Word format. In preparation for running into the latter case, draft a version of your resumé in plain text so you’ll have it ready and available.
Some job postings request that the resume be in plain text and in the body of the message. So I would write a conventional cover letter (date, address block, Dear XXX:, body of letter, signature line) and then a line of asterisks followed by the resume. Does that sound right? It does seem a little odd to include the standard letter stuff (address block, Dear XXX) in an e-mail.
Another thing is that you need to be careful when translating from Word to plain text (ASCII). If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with some weird formatting in the text. I get around this by maintaining two separate copies of my resume.
I used to use PDFs for my CV, but had two problems. One large recruitment agency uses a very restrictive IT security setup and would only accept .DOC files as attachments (they didn’t even have Acrobat Reader installed).
Several others requested I resend my CV in Word format so that they could add a front page with their own details, or to remove my personal details to “anonymise” the CV.