You have one chance to make a great first impression. When applying to work-at-home jobs online, that first impression comes with a professional cover note and resume. Most people copy their resume and letters into an email and hit send without realizing that the recipient’s email program may not be able to retain the formatting or hidden coding from a document. For example, instead of your resume showing up looking like this:
Name
Address
Email
Job Experience
Eduction
It might show up looking like this:
NameAddressEmailJobExperienceEduction
Another problem is the Word smart quotes or apostrophes often get converted into a series of characters. So instead of looking like this ” or ‘, they look like this “quotesâ€. These issues can happen when you paste your resume in an online form as well. However, the problem isn’t immediately apparent to you. When you paste your content, it will look like your original document. The problem is that the form or email isn’t able to deliver what you sent and converts what it doesn’t understand into something it does understand. Unfortunately, the recipient gets illegible text.
To avoid this problem change your resume to plain text. It may look boring, but it will have a better chance of showing up in an employers email box legible and professional. To email your resume in plain text:
- Open your resume.
- Highlight the entire document either by choosing “select all” or dragging your cursor over the text while holding down the left mouse button.
- Right click your mouse and select “Copy” from the menu.
- Open your text editor (PC users use Notepad).
- With your cursor in the open text editor document, right click and select “Paste”.
- Clean up any issues such as adding additional line breaks and eliminated extra spaces as needed. All text should justify to the left.
- Highlight all the text again and right click to select “Copy”.
- Open your email account and click to compose a new email.
- Right click your mouse and select “Paste”.
- Check that your resume appears professional. Once you have all the information you need in the email, click “Send”.
Watch a video tutorial on emailing your resume below.
