Know the right way to send your résumé via email. Here are some tips to help
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Applying for a job these days more often than not means sending your résumé and cover letter in electronic format. Some employers ask you to email your resume in the proper format. Others request that you apply using the online form that they supply. It helps to know how to handle this.

Twin choices
When sending a job application by email, you basically have two choices. You can either attach your file to the email, or else include your text in the body of your email message (by typing it in directly, or by copying the text from your existing résumé and pasting it in.)

In either case, you want to ensure that the recipients can use what you send them in a way that best suits their needs. For example, quite a few employers today employ “optical scanning” to process résumés. This simply means that they will be using computer technology to read your application and pick out key words as a means of sorting and ranking all the résumés that they receive.

Copy and paste
This being the case, it makes sense to copy and paste the text of your résumé directly into the body of your email. This way if the employer uses optical scanning, the computer can easily read the “plain-text” you’ve provided, because it doesn’t have any fancy fonts or special layouts that might otherwise confuse the scanner.

Good impression
However, not all employers who ask you to submit your résumé via email use optical scanning. Instead, a real person will be opening up the emails and manually reading each résumé. You can make a good impression in this case by attaching a “hard copy” of your résumé — with its fancy fonts and nice layout — in the form of an MS Word document (or a compatible one with a .doc suffix).

Double deal
Since you may not know in advance whether the employer prefers an attached document or text in the body of your email, it may be to your advantage to include both, each time you submit an application. You can mention in the opening lines of your email that you have included a plain-text version of your résumé for scanning and an MS Word-compatible version for convenience.

Tech tools
The other variable to consider is if you should use the HTML feature of your email, if it is available to you. With HTML, you can transform the plain-text within the body of your email by adding bold lettering, italics, bullet points, colour and symbols.

This may sound appealing, in that the appearance of your text is enhanced. The catch is that not all employers would want to receive your email in HTML format. Thus, if an employer prefers to accept emails using plain-text only, your submission may not appear as you had intended it to. Therefore, it is still appropriate to skip the HTML format and stick to the simpler plain-text in your emails.

Of course, applying directly through a job site provides you with potential advantages. You can either upload your existing résumé as is, or else copy and paste it in the space provided. Along with this sometimes there is the option of including your cover letter. This may enhance the impression you make on the employer.

Once you have submitted your application directly through a job site, you are immediately informed that your application has been successfully sent to the employer. If you just use regular email it is difficult to know this. Moreover, job sites display a selection of related jobs that you may want to apply for as well.

Source: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)