Submitting resumes via e-mail or Web sites in text-based (also known as ASCII-text) format is becoming a widely accepted practice in today's job market. Compared to "snail mail," e-mailing your resume can really speed up the response time for you and your prospective employer, and a resume posted online has the potential to reach far more people than you'd want to lick stamps and envelopes for.

View a sample text-based resume

The following tips are designed to help you send a professional-looking, effective text-based resume anywhere, whether it's in an e-mail or to a Web site like this one.

• First of all, put the text of your resume in a separate file from the print version before formatting it for Internet transmission. It might help to save it in "plain text" or "ASCII text" format - on a DOS/Windows PC, the resulting filename will have the extension ".txt" after it.
• Keep the lines of your resume to 60 characters or less. Some e-mail programs add permanent line breaks to incoming messages to keep them to a certain width, which could disrupt your careful formatting. But lines of 60 characters or less won't be touched.
• Use a monospaced font like Courier while formatting your text-based resume - that way you can use spaces in place of tabs to align text elements, and it will be easy to see if you're going over your 60-character-per-line limit. The resumes on this Web site will automatically be displayed in a monospaced font, and most e-mail programs display plain-text messages with monospaced fonts, too.
• You don't have bold, italic or multiple fonts and sizes at your disposal, but you can use a combination of dashed lines, multiple returns and ALL CAPS to establish the same visual hierarchy that a print-based resume would have. Either way, consistency is the key.
• Use asterisks in place of bullets. Certain special characters transmit unpredictably via e-mail and the Web, and the bullet, often used in resumes, is one of those characters.
• Put the most important information about yourself near the top of your resume. Employers are busy, and they'll often print a screenshot or the first page of your e-mail or Web page rather than scrolling to read the entire document.
• E-mails are not Web pages, so don't e-mail your resume using HTML encoding. (If you can see font, size, style and color options in the toolbar of your e-mail message, you might be sending HTML mail.) If you send an HTML-mail message to someone without HTML mail capability in their e-mail program, your message will be a jumble of HTML code on their screen, and even if they can view it correctly, it might not look the same on their screen as it does on yours. Sending the message in plain text format is the safest way to go.
• If you have a Web-based e-mail account from a site like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, you can keep your text-based resume as close as the nearest Net-connected computer, no matter where you are. Paste it into an e-mail to yourself at your own Hotmail or Yahoo! address, so you can forward it to a prospective employer or copy and paste it into a Web site form at a moment's notice.
• If you want to e-mail a fancier version of your resume to an employer by attaching a Word document or Acrobat PDF file, go right ahead. Just make sure that the file is of a reasonable size (100K or less) and that you still include the plain-text version in the body of your e-mail, just in case your recipient can't open or print the attachment.

Here's a sample text-based resume, monospaced with the line length set to 60 characters. This is not the only way to format a text-based resume, just an example: