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Tips for your E-mail resume
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January 30, 2001: 7:37 a.m. ET
The Internet-ready resume requires some basic rules of thumb
By Peter Weddle
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - You can stop licking those stamps.
According to a new survey by Office Team, a California-based staffing firm, almost half of U.S. employers now prefer to receive candidate resumes via the Internet.
That's up from 4 percent just two years ago. But how do you send a resume online and what must you do to ensure that it arrives with its content intact?
Resumes travel online as e-mail. They can be included in the body of an e-mail message or attached to it. However, many employers do not accept e-mail with attachments because computer viruses are also transmitted that way. They quickly hit the Delete button rather than take a chance.
So, the basic rule of thumb is always send your resume as the text of an e-mail message unless an employer specifically states, on its Web site or in its job postings, that it will accept resumes sent as attachments.
To embed your resume in an e-mail message, you must first eliminate all of the document's formatting.
(Click here to access Peter Weddle's Web site for job searchers.)
E-mail technology cannot accommodate the centering, paragraphing, bolding and other "eye friendly" features installed in the document by your word processing system. You can easily remove them, however, by using the Save As function on your computer and creating a second version of your resume in ASCII text or Rich Text Format. Once that's done, proofread the document carefully to be sure that no information was garbled or inadvertently eliminated in the re-formatting process.
 Then, you'll have to make two other changes to prepare your document for its journey in e-mail:
1. First, remove any business or higher mathematical symbols from the document. Currently, e-mail technology can interpret and understand only the characters that appear on your computer keyboard. Such symbols as ©, the copyright sign, and ¸, the division sign, are unintelligible to e-mail systems.
2. Second, change the margins of your resume to 65 characters in width and end each line with a hard carriage break (i.e., by hitting the Enter button). Unfortunately, e-mail systems have margins that are much narrower than those of word processing systems and cannot "line wrap" or continue sentences onto another line when they exceed the margins. Therefore, slimming down your resume is the only way to ensure that nothing gets dropped into the cyber waste bin when the document arrives at its destination.
Once you've made those adjustments, your resume is Internet-ready. To send it off into cyberspace, you'll simply copy it into the body of an e-mail message. This process, which is also known as "cutting and pasting," involves the following five steps:
Step 1: Hold down the left button on your mouse and highlight your entire resume.
Step 2: Hold down the Ctrl button on your computer keyboard and simultaneously hit the "c" button.
Step 3: Open your e-mail program and start a new e-mail message.
Step 4: Click your mouse in the body of the message form and then hold down the Ctrl button on your keyboard and simultaneously hit the "v" button.
Step 5: Address your message, identify the position for which you are applying in the Subject line or simply enter "The Resume of Jane Doe," and send it off.
One final word of caution. If you decide to send your resume to a recruitment site for inclusion in its resume database (whether it's Monster.com, FlipDog.com or the site maintained by your professional association), always date the document.
Resumes in public databases are often copied and re-copied by other sites, so there's no knowing where your resume will end up. Dating the document, however, will avoid any embarrassment later, when your employer finds that old resume out there on the Net.
Peter Weddle is one of the nation's leading experts in online job searching. He has written numerous books, including "Career Fitness" and "CliffsNotes: Finding a Job on the Web." For more information, please visit his site at http://www.weddles.com/. 
* Disclaimer
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