Alpha Omega - Cyber-Savvy Résumés

"People forget how fast you did a job--but they
remember how well you did it.
- Howard Newton, advertising executive

CYBER-SAVVY RÉSUMÉS:
ASCII Formatting Tips for a Successful Trek Over the Internet

By Susan Britton Whitcomb, NCRW, CPRW

Can your résumé survive a trek through cyberspace? Formatted correctly, your résumé can certainly impress employers. Formatted incorrectly, it can bomb . . . bullets can mysteriously morph into question marks, tabs may convert into gaping spaces, bold and italics will disappear, and formatting in general will flop.

Jennifer M., conducting her first online job search, responded to an e-posting for an advertising sales representative. Unbeknownst to Jennifer, the employer received garbled data that read in part like this:

Youþll note my r&abcd;sum&abcd; summarizes experience selling Yellow PageÖ advertising, highlights of which include these achievements:

? Top PerformerÇRanked #1 for quota performance among team of 25 for five consecutive years.

? B-2-B ExpertÇCaptured increases of 25-65% in key accounts, upselling traditional print products and cross-selling new Web-based advertising.

? Team LeaderÇDesigned innovative sales aids, electronic tools, and procedural efficiencies that were adopted regionally; voted ÙOutstanding Team PlayerÙ by peers.

What Jennifer intended the employer to read was this:

You'll note my résumé summarizes experience selling Yellow Page™ advertising, highlights of which include these achievements:

• Top Performer—Ranked #1 for quota performance among team of 25 for five consecutive years.

• B-2-B Expert—Captured increases of 25-65% in key accounts, upselling traditional print products and cross-selling new Web-based advertising.

• Team Leader—Designed innovative sales aids, electronic tools, and procedural efficiencies that were adopted regionally; voted “Outstanding Team Player” by peers.

As companies large and small turn to technology to scan, download, search, or storehouse résumés, online job seekers need to be aware of a few tech-tips that will improve their chances of a clean read on the employer’s end. An employer’s instruction to “email your résumé to dreamjob@greatcompany.com” may sound simple enough. The inclination of many job seekers is to quickly email their résumé as an attachment. Unfortunately, sending an attachment can create several problems for hiring managers.

Why Attachments Can Backfire

There are three troublesome issues associated with attachments:

Compatibility: An attachment assumes that the receiver has the same software you do. Never assume! Although it may seem so, the entire planet does not use Microsoft Word. Even different software releases (for instance, Microsoft Word 2000 vs. Microsoft Word 6.0) can cause glitches. And, many people are unaware that opening an MS Word document in MS Works (Microsoft’s scaled-down word processing program) can really wreak havoc with formatting. Variations in systems, platforms, and printers can also cause grief.

Time: It takes extra time to download and open an attachment. Granted, this time may amount to less than a minute, but minutes each day add up. We live in an age when Internet surfers don’t have the patience to wait 30 seconds for a Web page to load. Hiring managers are often inundated with résumés, as well as pressing deadlines. Courtesy counts in the job-search game. Be polite by avoiding time-consuming attachments.

Safety: Viruses abound. To an email recipient, an attachment can carry the same suspicion as that of a deadly airborne disease. In an effort to curb destructive and costly computer viruses, many ISPs provide pop-up warning boxes that appear when a user is about to download an attachment. The warning asks email recipients if they know the sender of the attachment and then warn that they are about to download a document that may contain a virus. Some companies even have policies not to download or open attachments from unknown sources.

ASCII to the Rescue

To improve the odds for safe and sound transmission of your e-résumé, you’ll need to prepare an ASCII text version. When a hiring manager or networking contact says, “email me your résumé,” an ASCII résumé is the ticket. ASCII (pronounced “ask-ee”) is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The language assigns a seven-digit numeric code to each letter and character, such as numbers, spaces, and punctuation marks. There are no ASCII numeric codes for bullets, tabs, or graphic lines, which is why ASCII has deservedly earned the tag of “plain-text,” or another derivation, “plain-Jane.”

Despite ASCII’s limitations for visual appeal, the language has two distinct advantages. First, it can be digitally deciphered by any computer system and easily manipulated across Internet lines, onto employers’ Web forms, or into a company’s résumé database. There’s a second plus to plain-text: the use of ASCII implies technical know-how on the part of the candidate (you!).

Two Types of Conversion

There are two file types you’ll need to learn about for converting an MS Word file to an ASCII file. One is “Text Only” and is best used for pasting your résumé into forms at an employer's Web site or a career portal, such as FlipDog.com. The other is called “Text with Line Breaks” and is frequently preferred for pasting a résumé into the body of an email message.

Tech-Tips for Converting to Text Only

The conversion process to Text Only in MS Word is a snap:

Save the File: With MS Word open and your résumé document on the screen, click File, Save As. Click the drop-down arrow in the Save As Type box; scroll down and select “Text Only.” (Corel WordPerfect users, select ASCII [DOS] Generic Word Processor.)
Name the File: With your cursor in the File name box, type a new name for your document. (Helpful Hint: Although it's not necessary to change the name of your document, many job seekers find it helpful in order to help them differentiate between the original traditional version and the ASCII version. For instance, if the name of your current résumé file is “tom-resume,” consider naming the new text version “tom-resume-text.”) Click Save. Make note of what folder the file is saved in.
Close the File: Click File, Close to remove the file from the screen.
Tweak the File: Follow the steps below under “Dress Down Your Doc” to ensure your document is as neat and tidy as possible.

Tech-Tips for Converting to Text with Line Breaks

Converting a document from MS Word to Text with Line Breaks requires a few more steps than the “Text Only” process. Your goal is to reduce the amount of words that appear on each line and cause the entire text of the document to stay within a column that measures approximately four inches wide, which is the size of most email program screens.

Highlight the Document: With MS Word open and your résumé on screen, highlight all of the document by touching Ctrl A. This will select the entire document if you are using Microsoft Word (and newer releases of Corel WordPerfect).
Change Margins: Click File, Page Setup, Margins. Enter 1" in the boxes labeled Top, Bottom, and Left. Enter 2.5" in the box labeled Right. Click OK. (Corel WordPerfect users: click Format, Margins, Page Margins; then enter 1" in the boxes labeled Left, Top, and Bottom; enter 2.5" in the box labeled Right. Click OK.)
Change the Font: With the document still highlighted (step #1 above), change the font by clicking Format, Font. Scroll through the font selections found in the drop-down box labeled Font or Font Face. Click on Courier or Courier New. You'll also see drop-down boxes for Font Style and Font Size. In the Font Style box, click Regular; in the Font Size box, choose 12 pt. Click OK. Click anywhere on the document to deactivate the document highlighting. Why Courier 12 pt? Because Courier is a fixed font, meaning each character takes up the same amount of horizontal space, and the 12 pt size will help to keep too many characters (letters, spaces or punctuation) from sitting on each line.
Save the File: Click File, Save As. Click the drop-down arrow in the Save As Type box; scroll down and select “Text with Line Breaks.” Click Save. Note what folder the file is saved in. (WordPerfect users: Click Save File as Type, Click the drop-down arrow in the File Type box and select ASCII DOS Text. Caveat: If using WordPerfect 6.1 or an earlier version, you must manually type the ".txt" extension in the File Name box [resume-linebreaks.txt]. Click Save.) As explained in Step 2 (Name the File) for converting to Text Only, you may find it helpful to give the new file name a distinguishing title, such as “resume-linebreaks.”
Close the File: Click File, Close to remove the file from the screen.
Tweak the File: Follow the steps below under “Dress Down Your Doc.”

Dress Down Your Doc

A few tweaks at this point can add immensely to the readability of your ASCII résumé. I recommend using your text editor for this fine-tuning process. To open the Windows text editor (Notepad), click the Windows Start button, Programs, Accessories, and Notepad. Open the File (if you have trouble locating it, remember to look in the folder where you saved your new Text Only or Text with Line Break file). Select the file and click Open. Follow these tweaking tips:

Replace Bullets: If you’ve used bullets to dress up your résumé—and what would a résumé be without an obligatory bullet or two?—, manually replace each bullet with an asterisk (*). For easier reading and accurate scanning, make sure there is one space between the asterisk and the start of your text.
Replace Unsupported ASCII Characters: Scroll through the document to check for other glitches. In addition to fixing bullets, you’ll want to replace other characters that may have converted improperly. Remember that ASCII is limited to letters and characters found on your keyboard, such as the tilde (~), percentage sign (%), or ampersand (&). Characters such as bullets, em dashes, en dashes, straight quotes, and symbols (copyright, registered, trademark, pound, yen, etc.) will sometimes convert into an odd character, such as a thick square or a foreign letter, (Ä, Ü, etc.). It’s a good idea to spell out ampersands and percentage signs. In some cases the plain-text resume may be scanned, and these characters can be easily misinterpreted by scanners.
Add White Space: ASCII is notoriously plain and difficult to read. To counter readability issues, make sure each paragraph is separated by two line spaces. You may also want to use two line spaces between bulleted items. To add a line space, place your cursor at the end of a paragraph and touch the enter key. Consider placing three line spaces before category sections to set them off clearly.
Left-Justify All Text: Delete any large spaces caused from center codes, right tabs or columns in your original document. Typically, your contact information (address, phone, email) or employer dates will need to be moved to the left margin.
Clean Up Spacing: Use one space instead of two between sentences and after colons.
Set Off Category Headings: Format category headings (Objective, Education, Experience) in all CAPS. Consider accenting category headings by adding a few equal signs separated by spaces (= = =) or tildes (~ ~ ~) or some other combination of keyboard characters. (Caveat: Repeated characters without spaces between them can cause problems for older computer systems. If you know that your recipient has an up-to-date system, fine; if you’re not certain, avoid repeating characters. Using a space between each character should keep older systems from having a conniption. Also, don’t extend the repeated characters too far beyond the width of the category title; repeating the same character 60 times across the line will cause an unsightly line break if you’re pasting the résumé into a forms box that allows only 40 characters from left to right.) Here are a few options for dressing up category headings:

QUALIFICATIONS
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

QUALIFICATIONS
-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-

= = = QUALIFICATIONS = = =

For some creative ideas on making plain text look more interesting, check out the formatting enhancements that technical writers use in the “Read Me” files found in new software programs.

Click here to see an example ASCII text résumé. You can also view the original before résumé (prior to rewriting) and after example (note the new strategy and content presented in a traditional print format).

Ready for Lift-off!

Your résumé should now be ready for a successful launch into cyberspace. With the résumé still on the screen in Notepad (make sure you’ve saved your changes first by clicking File, Save), click Edit, Select All. Right click the mouse and select Copy. To email, open your email program, position the cursor in the body of the email message, right click, and paste. Use an appropriate “Re:” line, such as, “UCLA MBA with 10 years’ product management exp” or “John Smith Résumé-Warehouse Specialist.” Place the recipient’s email address in the “To:” box, and click Send. (Note: It’s a good idea to send a test copy to your own email address, as well as to a friend who has a different email program than you. It will give you and your ally a chance to view and correct any glitches before you submit to dreamjob@greatcompany.com!)

An Easier Way?

One job seeker asked, “Can’t I skip most of those steps and simply use the Save As function?” Yes, but at an extreme risk that the receiver—your potential boss whom you’re trying to impress—will end up with a jumbled page of text with a few hieroglyphics sprinkled in. Don’t cut corners—in just a few steps, you can prevent morphing and other mishaps from occurring. Take the time to do it right. As the advertising executive Howard Newton said, “People forget how fast you did a job—but they remember how well you did it.”

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