On a recent Monday morning, Olga Ocon, an employment recruiter in Los Altos, Calif., decided to sift through a folder containing e-mails identified as spam. Tucked away among 756 ads for Viagra, cellphones and loan-refinancing offers, which were all set to be deleted after a few days, were eight résumés.
Every week, Ms. Ocon receives more spam, increasing the chances that she could miss a good job candidate. "If it's in there, it's going to be harder to dig out," she says. She suspects that one résumé containing the phrases "four-time winner of sales awards" and "oversaw in excess of $40,000,000 in sales" was caught by a program on her computer that is designed to filter out e-mail containing money-making offers.
As companies have tightened e-mail filters in recent months to keep out spam and a spate of damaging computer viruses, they also unintentionally have blocked all sorts of legitimate e-mail. Few companies are talking about it, but e-mails containing job seekers' résumés are among the files commonly being deleted, according to recruiting-technology experts.
Warning: Don't send your resume to a potential employer using your work e-mail address! Your work e-mail account may not be private. Use a personal e-mail account (e.g. AOL, hotmail.com, etc.).
Do not attach your resume to an e-mail message:
• It may, or may not, get through to the addressee because of the different networks to be transited.
• E-mail messages with attachments may be deleted without being opened.
• Attachments may contain viruses, particularly if they are Microsoft Word documents.
• In large companies, internal systems may stop e-mail attachments from entering the company network to protect against virus infestations.
• Some recruiters are reluctant to take the time to open an attachment.
So, what does work? Copying your resume into the body of your e-mail message works.
NOTE: Before you e-mail your resume to a potential employer, test it by sending it to as many friends and family as you can, particularly those using an ISP different from the one you use. Have the recipients forward the entire message back to you. Check to be sure that it comes through cleanly and readably.
• Make the message Subject interesting! You need to quickly capture the attention of someone who is probably looking at a full e-mail inbox, seeing only the date, subject line, and sender of each message. If they don't know you (and assume that they don't, even if you have spoken with them), they won't automatically read your message. (If you do speak with a hiring manager or HR rep, ask them what you should put in the subject line so that they will recognize your message.)
Hint: "My Resume" isn't going to grab the attention of a busy person. Make the subject relevant to the person who will be looking at it, e.g. "Help Desk Representative with 3 years of consumer products experience," "Job # [use the position identifier from the posting or headline from the ad] Applicant," etc.
• Create a "cover letter" message just as you would in print (don't be long-winded).
• If you have created a Personal Resume Web Page that is available on the web, you can point to it (use the complete URL, including the "http://" at the beginning and most e-mail software will interpret it as a clickable link).
• Type your "signature" at the bottom of your "cover letter."
• After your signature, add a couple of blank lines and the text notation
========= Resume Text Below ==========
• Add 2 more blank lines, and then start your resume.
• Cut and paste the text from your ASCII resume into the body of your e-mail message next, making sure that each line is no more than 60 characters long
• To help with the measurement, make one line 60 (or 50 or 45) characters long by typing an X 60 (or 55, etc.) times.
• Don't let any lines of your resume be longer than that line of X's.
• Use spaces not tabs for indenting.
• Use capitalization and lines of equal signs (see above) or dashes to add some "underlining" for emphasis
• Don't try to center or justify the text.
• Be sure to delete the line of X's before you send your message.
This should keep the margins and indenting of your resume neat.
• Don't accidentally add contact information (your name, address, phone numbers, and "real" e-mail address).
Test Before You Send to an Employer
Test your resume by sending your resume to yourself, first, after you have gone through the steps above. Then, send it to friends who hopefully use a different Internet Service Provider and e-mail software to thoroughly test your resume. Particularly if you use AOL, test your ASCII resume by sending it to someone outside of AOL.
Wall Street Journal
