When submitting your resume to a company for employment consideration, it’s become almost a rule to do so over the Internet. Many companies won’t look at a resume that’s received through non-electronic means.

So now that you know that you will very likely continue to be required to submit your resume online, it’s a good idea to learn how to do so the right way. Here are a few tips to consider:

Attachments

There is a little bit of a debate going on about whether you should add the resume as an attachment when submitting it or placing it in the body of the e-mail. Some say that attachments aren’t a good idea, as they take up space in the employer’s inbox and may possibly contain viruses. It’s also worthwhile to consider that a company’s email security might block the message, or the hiring manager might avoid the message altogether if he doesn’t want to take the time to open it.

On the other hand, depending on what e-mail program you’re using (and the employer is using) cutting and pasting your resume into the body of an email could look ill-formatted. Spacing and fonts can change, leaving you with a completely different document than what you’d worked hard to lay out. It is for this reason that many pros suggest doing both. This works whether the hiring manager you’re emailing dislikes attachments or prefers them, and it avoids possible issues that your attachment might have like data corruption. Another good idea is to use a PDF format when sending the resume, as it always looks clear and clean and it doesn’t allow anyone to change your resume (other than you).

If You Are Cutting and Pasting …

If you’ve decided that you want go ahead and paste your resume into the body of an e-mail, it’s good to consider a few rules of cutting and pasting. First, remember to add a brief introduction of yourself, something that would do the job of a cover letter. Secondly, you should watch your introduction length quite carefully; keep it to 3 lines or less per paragraph and no more than two paragraphs.

Third, use text for the e-mail instead of HTML. Copying and pasting text can remove or ruin formatting, as poitned out earlier, and these problems are especially common when your resume was created with Microsoft Word or other word processors. You can copy and paste from a text-only program like Microsoft’s Notepad (which is included on every Windows computer) if you can’t figure out how to change an email to pure text. Of course, this means you don’t have bold and italics on your side, but you can set different sections of the resume apart by using a format like =====Resumes==== or by capitalizing text.

Avoiding Spam Folders

As mentioned previously, your resume can sometimes get lost in a company’s security efforts. So to help you avoid spam folders and other issues, you could consider keeping punctuation (especially exclamation marks) out of the subject line and avoiding any other words that might be misinterpreted as something inappropriate by spam folders.

The last thing that you want is to create the perfect resume only to not have it reach its destination appropriately. Taking the time to submit a resume via email correctly is certainly worth the extra time, especially when you’ve spent so much time to create that perfect document in the first place.