Do You Have an Electronic Résumé? You Should.

It’s 3 AM. Your eyes are droopy, and you have to get up in four hours for a job that pays too little money, and respect.

The good news is you’ve found the perfect job surfing the web a few hours ago. The bad news is, you’re still trying to cut and paste your résumé into the company’s online application bank. And, it’s not going well. The document’s spacing is all wrong. The bullet points have disappeared. And what’s worse? Unrecognizable symbols have littered the text, making it unreadable.

What’s an (exhausted and highly frustrated) job seeker to do?

A.) Go to bed and try again tomorrow. Maybe there is something wrong with the company’s webpage and one of their IT workers will notice and fix it in the morning.

B.) Cross your eyes, pull your hair out and cry (quietly, of course. You wouldn’t want to wake the neighbors).

C.) Go to your hard drive and retrieve your electronic résumé. Open. Copy. Paste. Celebrate!

If you answered A or B, chances are you either haven’t heard of an electronic résumé, or you haven’t made the time to draft and save one.

What is an Electronic Resume?

When I first herd the term “Electronic Resume” a few years ago, I envisioned advanced digital documents that would replace the need for paper résumés. Perhaps that’s what you thought of when you first heard the term, too.

An Electronic Résumé, however, is nothing more than a “bare-bones” copy of your existing résumé. In other words, it’s your résumé (same content), only plainer (no special font, formatting, borders, or bold, italic or underlined text).

Tips on Drafting Your Electronic Résumé

Open your original document, hit "File", "Save As". Rename the original document to “Electronic Resume” so you don’t loose it, and save it in Plain Text.Next, Highlight the text and choose the Courier New, Times New Roman, or Ariel font. These are acceptable fonts for drafting Electronic Résumés, as they are easy on the eyes and nearly all word processing programs can recognize them. Make sure the Header includes your name, address, phone number and email address, all on separate lines.Omit bullet points, bolding, underlining or italicizing. Edit for format (Is the spacing uniform? Is everything where you want it to be?) , as well as for content (is everything still accurate and spelled correctly)?