Following the increasing use of e-mail by candidates to send their resumes and after having published several advertisements containing the e-mail address to which they can reply we feel able - having examined a large sample of these resumes - to write a little resume etiquette by email.
We therefore ask, in order to facilitate our work and that of others, to follow these brief indications:
Insert in the title or in the text of the message the reference number to which you intend to reply. Entering this number in the attachment, perhaps at the bottom of the last page, risks that this information will not be seen and the curriculum will be included in the generic database.
If you can insert the resume directly in the message, do so, this makes the message shorter, takes up less memory on your computer and takes less time to send and receive. Some email software (old versions of cc:mail and Eudora) had problems with attachments: if you use these versions the attachment will be a random sequence of letters and numbers. Much better then insert the resume in the message itself. Also you avoid any virus problem. To keep the curriculum formatting unchanged, the mail client must be enabled to send messages in HTML format. For those who use OUTLOOK Avoid the word format for e-mail, only people who use OUTLOOK read it.
Avoid using particular formats to save the attachment. Companies usually don't use programs designed for family use such as Works. Sometimes companies use unix or mac systems. In general, a Word 97 or earlier format is fine for us and for other companies and is much less cumbersome than a Word2000 format. In fact, companies do not always update their word processors every few months and in this way there is no risk of sending an unreadable file. For the same reason, avoid passwords, animations, etc. To be completely sure that your curriculum reaches its destination, save it as text (.txt) or as Rich Text Format (.rtf), in this way you will have full security that it can be read.
If your resume sent in paper version occupies three pages, do not make it seven pages if you send it via the internet. The customer who wants to print it will not rejoice if the printer is busy for minutes and many half-empty printed sheets: watch out for page breaks!
Receiving hundreds of files called "CV.doc" "curriculum.doc" "cvsintex.doc" is not much fun for those who would like to archive these curricula, as well as print them on paper. What to do? Rename them all? You don't always have the time to do this job and you run the risk of overwriting a "cv.doc" with another "cv.doc" with the same name and different content. The suggestion to distinguish your curriculum from others is to call it with your name and surname; in this way it will be easier for the company or for the recruiter to recover it even after a long time.