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 believe that adding the resume as an attachment can often take up too much space in an inbox while bringing with it the possibility of security threats like 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 could be weird – and worse, the fonts you worked so hard to choose could change. It is for this reason that many pros suggest doing both. This way, you can please those who don’t like looking at attachments, as well as those who can’t stand strange formatting. 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. As mentioned previously, formatting can cause a lot of problems when copying and pasting into e-mails – especially from word processing programs like Microsoft Word. If you don’t know how to change an email to plain text in your email client, an easy alternative is to use a text only program (Notepad is free and comes pre-installed on Windows), then copying and pasting your resume into email. Unfortunately, you won’t have the ability to use bold or italics in your resume with plain text, so you’ll have to use a bit of creativity to set different sections apart from one another–try using special characters around words, or using your capitalization (“RESUME INTRODUCTION”, etc).

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.