Electronic Resumes: What you should know

For starters, an electronic resume is a resume that is sent to an employer by electronic means – usually through email or internet. That's simple enough, these resumes are posted in internet resume banks where they can be searched, downloaded or viewed by Employer. A name that comes to mind is Monster.com, they handle thousands of resumes that employers can easily search and find candidates for their job openings. Not to mention, if you have a website you can post your resume and let anyone you want to see it.

The best thing about electronic resumes is that they can easily be sent to and from employers and job applicants, which is much faster and cheaper than old-school postal mail. Another great advantage of E-Resumes is that you can upload them in internet banks and takes very little effort to do so.

With the advancements of technology, employers have software that can pre-screen resumes from their databases. Makes it easy for them to find a job applicant that has a resume on file for more than a month.

There are two things that a good e-resume needs

• It must be "searchable"
• It must be in ASCII format

"Searchable" e-resume

This electronic resume has keywords imbedded in them. Since more employers are using software to find their next employees, they use keywords to find their workers. Sort of like Google or yahoo. They would type in a keyword like "systems analyst" into an internet resume bank and get the names of all the folks that have that in their resumes.

ASCII Format
In order to have an effective electronic resume you must format it properly. Since software and word processors aren't always compatible, you need to format your resume so an employer doesn't get an unorganized piece of paper.

An ASCII format resume means having …

• No bullets. Use asterisks instead
• No tabs, indents, centering, or right justification. Only spaces.
• No word wrap. Each line has to end in a hard carriage return.
• Courier Font
• No special Characters
• No bold, italic, underline or other special effects
• No borders or lines
• No graphics (not that you would add any graphics anyways)

In Summary

There you have it, a quick overview of what an electronic resume is and how to make one. With more employers looking for applicants online, you should really consider formatting your current resume to ASCII. If you need help in converting your resume into an electronic one, head on over to shibaresumes.com Or if you already have an electronic or regular resume you can Post if for FREE at HotResumes.com

Best of Luck in your Search and until next time