The Glory of the Plain Text Resume - CareerAlley

The Glory of the Plain Text Resume - CareerAlley We may receive compensation when you click on links to products from our partners. Working from home often means hunting online job boards for new gigs and clients. You might work for an online client for years and never meet her face-to-face. Even so, first impressions still count. How you present your resume can make or break an application for online work. Plain Text or Word Document? You can submit your resume in several ways and formats, but in most cases, youll want to use a plain text format. Online resume builders prefer to work with plain text, and either dont accept Word documents or automatically transfer Word docs into plain text formats. Often, the result of auto-formatting isnt pretty. Youll also submit your resume by email, probably several times a week if youre scouring the job markets. In most cases, youll want to include your resume in the content of your email. Many potential clients wont open attachments out of virus concerns, and some have email filters that automatically weed out incoming messages with attached files. more Killer Resumes Emails and Plain Text Heres a quick experiment to try. Copy your existing resume and paste it into a plain text email. Hows it look? Unless you formatted it specifically for email, chances are its a complete mess. Youll need a plain text resume designed with email in mind. Email formats typically have shorter text lines. Youll need to replace bullets with standard symbols such as asterisks, and some text may need retyping. Save the completed email resume as a plain text file. While youre building a plain text email resume, you might as well add a cover letter at the beginning of the document. Your letter should explain who you are, why youre qualified for the position, and why the reader should look at your resume. Youll need to modify the cover letter slightly for each application, but the bulk of the letterwho you are, what your skills are and so onwont need editing. A pre-written cover letter can save you hours of time during online job searches. Plain Text and Online Resume Databases Most online resume banks give you a choice. Either use their resume maker or upload your resume directly. Many of their online forms assume a chronological resume order, where jobs are listed by date. Thats great, if your resume is chronological. If you have, say, a range of skills as a contractor software analyst, you may want to list your skills before your job history. Uploading your resume to the database allows you to do so, rather than being bound to the sites default format. Using a pre-made plain text resume for resume databases has another advantage. The Internet offers many different resume databases and job-recruiting sites. Manually entering your resume into each sites forms is, to say the least, time-consuming. Its much faster to simply upload your resume. more Resume Formats Michelle Mantel is the Content Manager at Career Igniter and Resume Builder Online. The Illinois News Broadcasters Association, Illinois Broadcasters Association, and College Broadcasters Inc. have recognized Michelle for her outstanding work and commitment to Journalism. This is a Guest post. If you would like to submit a guest post to CareerAlley, please follow these guest post guidelines. Good luck in your search. Visit me on Facebook