You’ve been working hard on preparing your résumé in anticipation of a new job search.  You’ve written, re-written and the re-written your new résumé; you’ve asked your friends and colleagues to review and critique it for you and you’ve formatted the document just right.

Your new formatted résumé looks nice when you deliver it in person or mail it to a prospective employer, but you can’t use the same document for electronic distribution, such as the résumé function here on the Mobile Marketing Joblist.

Now it’s time to prepare a new résumé.  One that is easily readable by employers and recruiters when they retrieve your résumé from the Mobile Marketing Joblist or via other electronic means.

Don’t fret.  Your hard work is not lost.  It’s just going to take a little reformatting and maybe some patience.

Most word processing programs today will allow you to save a document as plain text.  I use Microsoft Word for most of my documents and on the rare occasions when I need a plain text document, I instruct word to save the file as plain text. Some may also refer to this as an ASCII document.  ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and goes back to the early days of computing.  It’s a standards thing.

You could write your résumé in a ASCII text editor like Microsoft’s Notepad, but you lose many of the convenient features like spell checking and setting the margins when you do that.  Save yourself some headaches and use a word processing program and then convert your résumé to plain text.

And always spell check.  And did I say remember to use the word processor’s spell check utility?.  Then read the document and spell check it one more time and then have a friend read it again for you.

Cliché time.  You have just one opportunity to make a first impression.  Make yours a good one.

When you save a document as plain text your words and sentence structure will remain, but all of that formatting like bullets, bold, underline, etc. will be lost.If you want to call attention to a particular word or statement in a plain text résumé, use ALL CAPS to replace the bolds letters.

We all tend to use bullets in our résumés today.  These should be replaced with another symbol such as an asterisk (*) or a dash (-).

It will take a small amount of time to “clean up” your plain text résumé, but the time will be well worth it when employers and recruiters begin to review your document.  A couple of key points to remember when finalizing your document:  1)Your new document will not have any page breaks, so don’t forget to remove any headers or footers or other reference to multiple pages and 2) Make sure your page width is not over 80 characters wide..

There are many useful sites on the internet to help your prepare a résumé.  If you feel you need professional assistance in preparing your résumé, The Mobile Marketing JobList has an affiliation with The Résumé Edge «http://www.resumedge.com»

Detailed tips on preparing the internet-ready résumé can be found at The Riley Guide: Résumés & Cover Letters  «http://www.rileyguide.com/eresume.html»