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 It's easy enough to describe the types of information you need to include and the guidelines you need to follow when putting together an electronic resume. But as the saying goes, "a picture paints a thousand words" and the same thing goes for resume examples. And that's just what we're going to do - provide you with electronic resume samples so you can visualize what you need to do when creating this type of resume format.
Posting and Scanning Electronic Resumes
There is a very good reason that your electronic resume needs to follow a certain format - because it is going to be either manually or electronically scanned by software. While software applications are getting more sophisticated every day, sometimes they just need a little bit of help.
In fact it's to your advantage if the scanning software is as accurate as possible when reading your resume - So why not help it along by following just a couple of simple rules or guidelines?
Guidelines for Electronic Resumes
Accurately scanning an electronic resume faces two obstacles - the organization of information on a resume and the characters, or fonts, used on the resume. Scanning software also looks for certain keywords to tell it why type of information is being conveyed - such as work experience.
In addition, the software is looking for, and organizing, keywords in the document so that the resume can be retrieved later on when trying to find resumes that match up against certain job requirements. So the formatting rules for an electronic resume help simplify this process by providing a clean and understandable layout for the electronic scanning system.
The following guidelines were used to produce the electronic resume samples we're going to provide later on in this publication:
- Restrict your use of fonts to Times New Roman, Arial or Helvetica.
- Use only one font size, preferably between 10 and 14 points.
- Remove all underling, bolding and italics.
- Remove any graphics or artwork on your resume including shading, vertical and horizontal lines.
- Make sure your name is only thing that appears on the first line of the document.
- Move all text to the left margin. Tabs, tables and centered text can sometimes confuse the scanning software.
- Bulleted items can confuse scanners, so convert them to simple hyphens or asterisks.
If you're looking for a more complete guide to this type of resume writing, then you can find one here - Electronic Resumes. In our examples, we're also going to add a special section that's found only in electronic resumes - keywords. But first let's talk about converting an existing resume format to an electronic format.
Converting Resumes to Electronic Resumes in the ASCII Format
If you have an existing resume and you're happy with the information contained in that resume, it's a fairly simple process to convert that resume into an electronic version. The only thing you need is a word processing application such as Microsoft's Word.
If you're using Word, the following steps can be used to convert your resume:
- Open your existing resume document file.
- Select all the text in the document and copy it into a new document. You can do this by using the commands: Edit, Select All followed by Edit, Copy.
- Create a new document file via: File, New.
- Paste the resume into the new document using: Edit, Paste Special, Unformatted Text. At this point you should have a plain text document without any bolding, underlining or tables.
- Close your existing resume document file so you don't mistakenly overwrite the file.
- You may have to manually replace tabs and remove bullets as noted in the guidelines above. You may also have to rearrange some information on your resume. For example, you want to make sure your name appears on the first line of the document.
- After you've finished making all your manual changes, it's time to save it in the ASCII format. You can do this right from Word using: File, Save As, then changing the Save As Type to Plain Text.
- At this point a dialog box will pop up for File Conversion. Under Text Encoding select Other Encoding, and then select US-ASCII.
- You should now be able to save the document in the ASCII format.
You may get a warning about text conversion - substitute characters if necessary. Make sure you read the document to make sure it converted correctly. The file will be saved with a .txt file extension.
Electronic Samples
We've followed the steps outlined above and converted a couple of resumes into electronic samples so you can see exactly what an electronic resume looks like:
- Electronic Resume - Nursing Sample - in this example, we've converted a resume following the guidelines above - but did not include a section for keywords.
- Electronic Resume - Professional Sample - in this example, we've not only converted a resume but we've also added a section for keywords. As mentioned earlier, you may want to include a keyword section on your resume to make it more "search" friendly. By adding keywords to an electronic resume you're increasing the chances of a keyword match to the specifications or requirements outlined in a job opening.
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