Nowadays, having a beautifully formatted CV is not enough - you need to have a plain text version of your CV that can be scanned by databases and read by humans, whatever their computer system.
The following is an extract from: 'The Quick Resume and Cover Letter Book' by Michael Farr, reprinted with permission from Jist Publishing.
Some scanning systems and databases stop reading CVs after a certain number of lines, often after about one and a half pages, so be sure that your most important information appears early in your CV.
You can easily reformat your existing CV for electronic submission:
- Open your standard CV file on your computer and select the Save As command on your toolbar, usually located under the file menu. Select Text Only, Plain Text or ASCII as the file type.
- Close the file and then open the new text-only version. You'll see that most graphic elements such as lines, images and bullet point symbols have now been eliminated. But if they haven't, go ahead and delete them.
- Limit the width of the body to no more than 65 characters.
- Use an easy-to-scan font such as Courier, Arial or Helvetica.
- Eliminate bold, italics and underlining if any remain after saving as text-only.
- Introduce major sections capitalised headers, rather than using bold, italics or underlining.
- Keep all text aligned to the left.
- Replace bullet points with plus symbols (+), asterisks (*) or hyphens (-), and lines or borders with equal signs or dashes.
- Instead of using the Tab key or paragraph indents, use the space bar to indent.
- When done, click Save or OK. Then reopen the file to see how it looks. Make any additional format changes as needed.
Now copy and paste your new CV into an email and send it to a friend who uses a different email provider - for example if you use Hotmail, send it to a friend who uses Yahoo email.
Do the same test, this time emailing it to someone who works in a large company, to see how it looks and whether it is legible after going through their email system. After getting their feedback, make any adjustments necessary to fix it.
