WHY YOU NEED AN ELECTRONIC RESUME

By Karen Conole

You’ve spent a lot of time and energy preparing your cover letter and a well-designed, visually appealing, word-processed resume and are finally satisfied with their form and content. Think you’re ready to apply for jobs now?

Not yet.

In this age of emails, scanners and computer searches, you’ll also need a resume that packs a punch when read “electronically”—perhaps even more so than your hard-copy resume.

Why? Because most employers now have little time to read and evaluate the high volume of resumes they receive and so rely on technology to pre-select promising candidate resumes for them. That is, they have all resumes scanned or downloaded into a database then do a computer search of those resumes for key words or phrases that they believe most closely reflect their job requirements.

If your resume contains those key words which the computer seeks, it will make the “first cut” and be selected for further review. If not, it will remain in electronic limbo, unseen by any real, living person at that organization, perhaps forever.

The two all-important things your electronic resume must have in order to get noticed are readability and relevancy.

READABILITY

You can create essentially two kinds of resumes, which provide two different levels of readability: The ASCII (“az-key”) resume or the simply scannable resume.

The ASCII Resume

Also called a “plain-text” or “electronic” resume, it has the very least formatting possible, so it has the highest level of readability for most computers and is the best form for submitting on Internet resume forms or via email.

ASCII resumes should have no italics, underlining, unusual or small fonts, or other fancy formatting. You may not like how low-tech your resume will appear without the personalization of formatting, but most online forms convert all resumes to plain text anyway, so don’t waste time adding features that will only add visual clutter, get misread or disappear when translated onto someone else’s search program.

Not every employer uses the same technology as you, and what you send out may not be what their computers can display, so don’t take a chance: Keep the formatting as basic as possible (and impress them with the content, instead).

Some pointers for ASCII resumes:

* Use 10- to 12-point font size.

* Courier, Arial and Times New Roman are among the best fonts for ASCII resumes because they are installed on most computers.

* Do not use italics, because each slanted letter tilts into what should be white space around it and can confuse software. It may translate italicized text into gibberish or make it disappear altogether.

* Do not underline words, because it can obscure text. If, for example, you underline the phrase “legal secretary,” the “g” and “y” will be partially obscured and may not be recognized by the software. Then any searches for resumes which include the words “legal” or “secretary” may not include your resume.

* Use UPPERCASE for headings (but don’t use it for the entire resume, because it’s the electronic equivalent of shouting and is considered rude).

* No graphics or dingbats.

* Bullets (•) are usually automatically converted to asterisks (*), which may be fine but may not. Some online resume forms and older optical scanners don’t recognize asterisks, so try this technique for adding bullets that are usually “ASCII-acceptable”: With “Num Lock” on, press and hold down the Alt key, type “0149” on your numeric keypad then release the Alt key.

* Tabs are converted into spaces and all text is realigned with the left side of the page, which is perfectly acceptable for ASCII resumes but if you want a little variation in the alignment use the space bar, rather than tabs, to indent text.

* It’s best to separate sections with extra blank lines, but if you want to add a horizontal line using hyphens (---), periods (...) or underscores (___) be sure to keep a blank line above and below it so that it stands a better chance of being read as a line (or simply gets deleted in translation, without affecting text).

Remember: No one expects ASCII resumes to look fancy (they all should look basically the same), so go easy on formatting whenever possible.

Also, the computer program receiving your resume may have different spacing, margin, and text style parameters. For example, your single horizontal line might wrap to a second, partial line. Your carefully centered text may shift way off center. A 5-space indent might end up looking like ten spaces. Right-justified text may never work out. To avoid such drastic repositioning, try to limit each line to just 60 characters and forget trying to center or right-align anything—instead use just a few spaces to “indent” characters slightly.

The Scannable Resume

This is another type of electronic resume, with a formatting level somewhere between a custom formatted, hard-copy resume and the stripped down ASCII version. It’s a semi-plain formatted, hard-copy resume that employers can scan into computers (usually for searchable databases) using optical character recognition (OCR) software.

It’s critical that your scannable resume have formatting with a font that conforms to standard letter shapes because OCR software needs to be able to “read” it accurately in order to convert it into intelligible, searchable text. Plainer formatting provides enough “white space” around each letter, allowing the OCR software to recognize it.

The safest bet for a perfectly scannable resume is to follow the stringent ASCII resume formatting guidelines, but you can make it just a bit fancier if you want, provided you keep within these guidelines:

Some pointers for scannable resumes:

* In addition to Courier, Arial, and Times New Roman, scanners can usually read Garamond, Palatino, Helvetica, Tahoma, and Verdana.

* When determining which 10- to12-point font to use, consider the font style. Times Roman text, for example, looks “cluttered” when in less than 12-point, so you may want to use that font in a higher size than a cleaner, sans serif font like Verdana.

* Do not italicize or underline text, but you can use bold font for your headings, as long as the bolding doesn’t make the letters too “puffy” for the OCR software to recognize. If it can’t read the word(s) correctly it may add nonsensical text to your resume. As with an ASCII resume, it’s probably safer to use UPPERCASE for headings.

* Separate headings and paragraphs with at least one full line of white space, so that the OCR software can distinguish between sections.

* Do not use short vertical lines (|) or slashes (/), which may be read as letters (putting, for example, the uppercase “I” in the middle of the phrase).

* It’s important that letters appear as clearly as possible in order to be distinguished, so use black ink on white, cream or light grey paper only.

* Do not use paper in a size other than the standard 8½ x 11 inches, which fits most scanners.

* Use a large envelope that doesn’t require you to fold the resume before mailing. Folded paper shifts on scanner beds which can set the letters at an angle, making them difficult for the scanner to read. It can also jam in paper feeders or cause shadowy creases which may confuse the software.

RELEVANCY

In addition to ensuring that you’ve got your text in a format that most hardware/software can read, it’s equally important to ensure that its content is relevant, so that your resume gets the most “hits” in computer searches for positions you seek. This is done with “keywords.”

Keywords are those words or phrases specific to an occupation or job which are used to search resume databases for candidates whose profiles match particular job requirements.

For example, to find the best candidate resumes for a job requiring a litigation paralegal with Excel and trial team experience, a hiring manager might run a computer search for resumes containing the keywords “paralegal,” “civil litigation,” “Excel” and “trial team.” Only those resumes which contain those particular keywords will come up in the computer search.

Searches can also be done for words that describe education levels or experience (such as “Bachelors,” “ABA-accredited,” “promotion,” etc.) or just about any other qualities the hiring manager deems necessary for the job (“punctual,” “self-starter,” etc.)

In fact, scannable resumes are often called “keyword resumes” because of the importance of keywords with this type of resume.

The more you can include different relevant keywords which apply to both your skills and the work you seek, the more often your resume will be picked up by computer searches for further consideration, so think carefully about your wording.

Consider what words best describe your qualifications and determine which of those words an employer might enter as keywords into a search string for the type of position you seek. Those are the keywords you’ll want to include in your electronic resume.

If a job is advertised, search the ad for keywords that match your profile and add them when submitting your electronic resume for that position. In general, try to include those applicable words that commonly appear most often in ads for positions you seek.

You might also check out a targeted company’s website to see if it mentions any particular qualities that are important to them which you possess, then incorporate the corresponding keywords into your resume.

Be careful, though, not to make your resume merely a laundry list of keywords that you think will get you the most “hits.” It will not seem very subtle when read by a potential employer and might ultimately do more harm than good. You’re better off taking the time to work them into the narrative of your resume in a way that makes sense. If that doesn’t work, list them in a “Profile” or “Skills Summary” section near the top.

Submitting a plain-text (preferably ASCII) version is the fastest way to get your resume in front of an interviewer, but if you feel you must present your traditional hard-copy resume, send it via standard mail as a follow-up once you’ve been contacted, or present it at the interview.

CONVERTING YOUR RESUME TO ELECTRONIC FORMAT

You can convert your word-processed resume to ASCII format simply by copying and pasting it into an online resume form, a plain-text editor (like Windows® Notepad), or the body of an email. However, you’ll lose some formatting (maybe a lot) including tabs, and you might have to reformat it before sending it to get it the way you want, anyway, so it’s best to take the time to create a “master” copy which will require minimal, if any, additional reformatting to send.

You don’t have to retype your whole resume from scratch. Just open your existing resume file, then click “File,” “Save As,” and save it as “Text Only” or “Plain Text” (with the suffix “.txt”).

If you get Word’s warning that formatting will be lost, that means there’s still something in your resume that doesn’t work in ASCII, but that’s okay: Just click “Yes” and continue saving your new resume and Word will automatically remove whatever it was that prompted the warning.

You won’t see the changes until you close and reopen the .txt file, and you probably won’t like the new bare-bones look of it once you do see it, but scanners and search software will like it much better, now that it’s in their “language.”

To test your new ASCII resume, copy and paste it into the body of an email and send it to yourself. Then make whatever formatting adjustments are still needed:

* Remove extra spaces and “weird” characters that showed up in translation, upon conversion.

* Word converts all headers and footers to plain text and sticks them at the bottom of the file, so omit them or move them to where they belong. Bear in mind that only one header and one footer will work in an ASCII resume (at the very top and bottom) because the receiving computer applications decide where and if to break the pages, so make sure any important information you had in the footer is moved to the top of your resume.

* Since electronic resumes are read as one long page, omit any references to page two.

* Be sure your email sending format is plain text, not HTML.

In addition to all the formatting considerations, keep in mind these guidelines which apply to anything you send to prospective employers:

* Spell check and grammar check everything before sending. Then proof your document manually, because a word can be spelled correctly yet not be the correct word (for example, you may have typed “cat” when you really want “act”—an error that will not be detected by spell check and possibly not by grammar check).

* Skip the cutesy, unprofessional emoticons, such as smiley faces. Same goes for shorthand and acronyms, such as “u” (instead of “you”) and “TIA” (“thanks in advance”).

* Keep track of where you submit your resume. That way you won’t be submitting it too often to the same employers. You’ll also be able to find it to modify or delete. Over time, you can use the information to determine where the most productive sites are for sending your resume.

* Keep a record of the URLs, user IDs and passwords for all the job banks and employer sites which have your resume, so that you’ll know which to use when you want to update it.

* Never send your resume as an email attachment. Viruses can spread via infected attachments and many recipients, as well as virus-screening software, will simply delete emails with attachments—even plain-text (.txt) attachments that can't harbor viruses. Unless specified otherwise, include it directly in the body of your email.

* Don’t bother following up with a fancy formatted emailed resume, especially one with hypertext markup language (HTML) or embedded images. Since spammers use that type of formatting for advertising, it probably won’t get past most email filters anyway.

* Do include a brief, well-composed cover letter with your electronic resume, just as you would with a hard-copy resume. This is your first impression, so make it a good one.

Redoing your resume to appeal to a computer’s sensibilities—in addition to a human’s—takes some adjustment, but by knowing your audience you can ensure your resume gets the attention it deserves.