To create a résumé which will look consistently good when attached to an email, scanned, or viewed on a web browser, you should save your resume’ as a .pdf file. In Microsoft Word, this is as easy as choosing Save As and then .pdf. This is the resume format that should be sent out electronically and attached to job boards.
When the job board asks you to copy and paste your resume into a text box or place the resume in the body of an email, that is a whole different story. You must use the simplest formatting possible. This may mean sacrificing the features of your favorite word processor such as tables, paragraph borders, and custom fonts.
Follow these steps to create a résumé that will look good no matter where you send it. These directions will work for most word processing programs:
- Open your résumé in your word processor.
- Save the résumé as TEXT ONLY. (This feature is usually available by choosing Save As from the File menu)
- Close the résumé and reopen the new text-only version in Notepad or a similar plain text editor.
- Edit your résumé following the formatting suggestions below.
- Save the document.
To send your résumé in the body of an e-mail or paste it in a textbox, Select the résumé text from the TEXT ONLY file, Copy it, and Paste it into the e-mail or text box on the web page.
Formatting suggestions
- Use a non-proportional font such as Courier so that each full line of text appears as the same width on the page.
- Do not use tabs. They are often ignored by web browsers, and behave unpredictably in e-mail reader programs.
- Avoid trying to indent or center text using the spacebar. Keep all lines justified to the left side of the page, and use line breaks (“Enter” key) to separate headings and sections.
- Don’t rely on exact positioning of text using spaces or specific fonts. The font that you use to create your résumé is not necessarily the same font that will be used to display it on the Internet or in an employer’s e-mail program.
- To emphasize a word or words, use ALL CAPS rather than bold, or surround the text using ***asterisks*** or #other characters#.
- For bulleted lists, use the asterisk (*), hyphen (-), plus sign (+) or a similar common character. Keep in mind that long lines of text may wrap incorrectly underneath the bullets. To avoid this problem, keep list items under 60 characters wide.
- Don’t try to control the width of each line in a long paragraph by using returns. Just put a single return at the end of the paragraph to allow your text to wrap normally. It will then look consistently good even if the browser or email reader window is resized.