Santa Clara University

Electronic Resumes

As a 21st century job seeker, you must have an electronic resume ready to send at the click of a mouse. Attractive word-processed resumes are used for in-person meetings and often for e-mail attachments. Electronic resumes are used for web application and sometimes for inclusion in the body of an e-mail (always follow the employers’ instructions about format).

Below are the steps to follow when translating your word-processed resume to an electronic resume:

Step One: In your word-processed (Word, WordPerfect, etc.) document, save as text:

1. Choose “Save As” and change the type to “Plain Text”. In the subsequent dialog box, select the option to insert line breaks. A warning message will inform you that you will lose some formatting. Click “OK” or “Yes.”

Step Two: Open up your text document and clean it up:

1. Launch Notepad (PC) or SimpleText (Mac) and open your re-formatted text resume.
2. You’ll notice your resume looks very simple, and it probably needs some cleaning up.
3. Move any items that you may have had centered or tabbed to the left margin. All text should be flush left and there should be NO tabs in your text. On a PC, “Plain Text” does not remove all the tabs, so you will have some manual adjustments to make.
4. The first thing you will probably need to reformat is your heading. Make sure your name, address, phone and e-mail all appear on separate lines.
5. Make sure all headings are on separate lines with a blank line before and after. You may make the headings all CAPS if they are not already. This ensures a computer program can easily identify each section of your resume and store the data appropriately.
6. You might consider capitalizing (ALL CAPS) any items that you may have previously had bolded or italicized.
   
7. You will note that bullets have been replaced by asterisks (*). As you read through the text, make sure the bullets are still identifiable as such and have not run together.

Step Three: Make sure your resume is e-friendly:

1. Practice sending your text resume in an e-mail to yourself and to a friend who uses a different email service to make sure you’ve completely cleaned it up and it looks professional.
2. If possible, submit your resume on a web site and make sure it is computer friendly, although in most cases you will not be able to do this as a “practice run.”
   

• Resume Types and Appearance
• Tips
• Resume Components
• Accomplishment Statements
• Action Verb List
• Sample Resumes
• Electronic Resumes
• References