POSTING YOUR RESUME TO JOB BOARDS

The resume you create with your word processing program can look beautiful with all the bold face, bullets, fancy fonts, tabular formatting, centered headings, and other high-level formatting features that word processing applications do so well. But that same file, when "cut and pasted" into an online job board, can be unreadable. The solution is to turn that file into an ASCII text file, sometimes called a "plain text" file. This file format is the standard for posting resumes to most job boards. A lot of confusion surrounds how this file should be created but the process is easy if you just follow some simple steps. Here's how to create an ASCII text file for job boards from a Microsoft Word file:

1. Open your resume in Word.
2. "Select all" and leave it selected for the rest of this procedure.
3. Set the right margin to 2" and the other 3 margins to 1".
4. Remove all tabs and set all text flush left.
5. Set the font to Courier 10.
6. Remove all bold, underlines, and Italics.
7. Click on "file" at the top left of your screen. Select "save as" from the menu.
8. In the box that says, "Save as type", choose "text only (*.txt)".
9. Click the "Save" button.
10. Click "yes" to the warning asking if you're sure you want to save the file in this format.

That's it. You now have an ASCII text file of your resume you can cut and paste to job boards.

Hint: The only difference between an ASCII text file for "cut and paste" into job boards and an ASCII text file for "cut and paste" into e-mail messages is that the e-mail version has line breaks. To create this file, choose "text only with line breaks (*.txt)" in step 8 above. Be sure to give it a different file name than your job board file so you don't overwrite it.