Many job boards and resume distribution services, require you to have a text version of your resume.  A text or ASCII formatted resume can add tremendous value to your job search and here is why…

• Text resumes have a higher chance of passing through a spam filter when embedded into an email and not used as an attachment.
• Many employers use automated software to receive and parse resumes into their database.  Text resumes are easily converted and no important keywords in your resume are lost.
• Job board databases are sold to employers so they can search resumes.  A text resume has a higher chance of being found because the data is cleaner versus a Word or PDF document that needs to be electronically translated into searchable data by the job board’s software.

If you simply try to copy & paste the information from a Word document into the text field of a job application, your resume format and spacing will drastically change.  In addition, special formatting symbols, like bullets, will be replaced with unrecognizable symbols. Here is an easy procedure you can use to create a formatted ASCII text resume from a Microsoft Word resume.

1. Open your resume in MS Word
2. Click on ‘File’ and select ‘Save As’
3. In the ‘Save As’ window, change file type to ‘Plain Text’, and then click the Save button
4. After the File Conversion window appears, change the text encoding to ‘Other encoding’ and ‘US-ASCII’, check-off ‘Allow character substitution’, and then click the OK button

This produces an ASCII text document with proper formatting that you can email or copy & paste into any text field.

Tags: ASCII Text resume, Resume formatting, Resume Spider, ResumeSpider

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Resume Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.