Resume Writing, Resume Writing Tips, Writing A Resume

Follow these steps for an efficient way to combine your cover letter and resume:

1. Open the document that contains the cover letter you’ve composed for your prospective employer.
2. Go to the File menu in your toolbar and select Save As. Create a logical name for your new document (such as “letter and resume” or the name of the company you’re applying to). Choose where on your computer you want your new document to reside. Click Save or OK.
3. Delete the heading, date, and inside address of the cover letter in your new document.
4. Close the gap between the complimentary close and your name.
5. Replace “Enclosure: resume” with “RESUME”.
6. Open the MS Word document containing the resume you want to send to this employer.
7. Copy and paste your resume into your new “letter and resume” document so that your resume follows your cover letter immediately after “RESUME”.
8. Make sure that each element of your resume heading (your name, address, and contact information) appears on a separate line.
9. Add a Keyword section if you think your resume will be put into a resume database.
10. If your resume is more than one page, eliminate “Continued” at the bottom of page one and your name and “page two” at the top of page two. You won’t need these once your resume is in an e-mail message.
11. In your Education section, be sure that there is only one date for each college degree completed.
12. Review your resume to make sure you’ve followed each of these steps.

Job-Hunt Hint

Stay up to date on new versions of your e-mail software. File transfers are bound to keep improving and a day will come when e-mailing your resume as an attached file will be as reliable as Mom’s apple pie. Until then, follow the step-by-step instructions in this section for a safe e-mail resume transfer.

Bonus Check

Here’s a crash course in how to cut and paste in MS Word:

1. Using your cursor, highlight the text of the document that you want to copy and place elsewhere (either within that document or in a different one).
2. Go to “Edit” in your toolbar and select “Copy.” (The text is now in your computer’s memory.)
3. Place your cursor where you would like to place the text you just copied.
4. Go to Edit in the toolbar and select Paste.

You did it!

After setting the margins, you may want to do a little adjusting of the text to make sure things look right. For instance, delete extra line spaces that may have inadvertently been created in the conversion or insert commas into the Work History where tabs once divided information.

Testing, Testing

Almost all of us get discouraged when we have technical difficulties. If you run into obstacles trying to e-mail your resume don’t give up! Get help from a friend, refer to your ISP manual, call tech support, or take a break and come back to your project later when you feel refreshed.

Even though you’ve followed the instructions in this chapter to the letter, conduct an e-mail test-run: E-mail your resume to yourself first to make sure it transfers accurately (using the directions following, minus addressing it to the employer!). If that works, try sending it to a friend who uses a different ISP or who works at a company with its own e-mail system. When you hear that your friend received your e-mailed resume with success, you’re ready to send it to your prospective employer.

Career Casualty

Keeping organized as you make multiple versions of your resume can be a challenge. Develop a plan to name your files logically and place them in folders that keep things straight.

Take Off!

You’ve done a great job of preparing your cover letter and resume in one word-processing document. Now you’re ready to drop it into an e-mail message and send it on its way. The following steps will get the job done:

1. Open a window to write a new e-mail message.
2. Fill in the e-mail address in the Send To box by typing the recipient’s e-mail address exactly as you see it, right down to the capital and lowercase letters. (Some addresses are not case-sensitive, but this accuracy may be important to the employer’s e-mail system.)
3. Put a title in the Subject line, and make it a good one like “Resume: Marketing Position”.
4. Without closing your e-mail message, open the MS Word document (Text-Only-with-Line-Breaks version) that contains your cover letter and resume.
5. Copy the entire text of your cover letter and resume and paste it into the e-mail window, where the body of the message goes.
6. Now that your cover letter and resume are in the e-mail message window, check that they look the way you want the employer to see them.
7. Take a deep breath and click Send.

Bonus Check

Give yourself the three-word test when it comes to writing a good subject line for your e-mail. Because most e-mail systems show only a few words of a subject line, make the first three words of your headline strong enough to make the employer open your e-mail.

The Least You Need to Know

• When delivering your resume and cover letter via e-mail insert them both into the e-mail message window instead of sending them as attached files.
• Use all caps instead of bold, underline, or italics to give emphasis to important words.
• Don’t exceed three pages once your cover letter and resume are combined into one e-mailable document.
• Run an e-mail test by sending your resume to yourself and to a friend who uses a different ISP, type of computer, or word-processing program.

Now it’s time to adjust the formatting of your cover letter and resume document so that it’ll slip into your e-mail message easily. Brace yourself: This two-step process will transform your handsome cover letter and resume into a very blandly formatted document. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the MS Word document that contains both your cover letter and resume (the “letter and resume” document you just created).
2. Go to File in the toolbar and select Save As.
3. When you have the Save As window open, rename your document using a name that will identify it accurately (like “resume in Text Only”).
4. Still within the Save As window, go to the pull-down menu for Save As Type and select Text Only.
5. Click Save or OK.
6. Close the document (no need to exit MS Word).
7. From within MS Word, reopen the document you just closed, which you’ve named “resume in Text Only.” (Warning! If you reopen the file by clicking the icon, it will become a Notepad document, which is not what you want. Instead, go to File in the toolbar and select Open, find the file named “resume in Text Only.txt,” and open it.) There’s your document, completely stripped of fancy formatting!