Berks & Beyond Blog

You’ve spent a lot of time developing a great-looking résumé and crafting a fantastic cover letter.  But, how do you make sure they don’t wind up looking like a mess when you send them electronically?

The American Staffing Association recommends the following steps for converting your cover letter and résumé from Word or WordPerfect documents into electronic ones:

1. Remove all formatting.  This includes lines, rules, boxes, bold, italics, and underlining. 
2. Standardize your font.  Change the font to Courier, size 12.
3. Change your margins.  Convert your page margins to 1 inch on the left and 3 inches on the right.
4. Save as a .txt file.  When you save the cover letter or résumé, choose “Save As” and change the type to “Text only with Line Breaks.”  A warning box may come up informing you that you might lose some formatting.  Click “OK” or “Yes.”
5. Reformat your résumé.  Launch Notepad (PC) or SimpleText (Mac) to reformat and clean up your résumé and cover letter. Move all centered items to the left margin, and make sure all text is flush left.  As you scroll through your documents, remove all Tabs, replace all bullets with asterisks (*), and change bolded words to all caps.  Increase white space by hitting Return twice between sections.
6. Make sure your cover letter and résumé are e-friendly.  Do not send them as attachments, but, rather, pasted in the body of the e-mail whenever possible.
7. Check before sending.  Practice sending them via e-mail to yourself as well as a friend who uses a different Internet service provider—to ensure the documents are clean and professional-looking.  Once you’ve made any required adjustments, your cover letter and résumé are ready for a prospective employer’s inspection.
8. Include keywords in your résumé.  Recruiters use keywords to search for résumés.  So choose some of the basic, important keywords in your field and pepper them throughout your résumé.  For example: web designer, account manager, communications specialist, to name some.

Need More Job Seeking Advice?

As one of Southern and Central Pennsylvania’s largest staffing companies, we at Berks & Beyond are always available to answer your employment-related questions.