The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Emailing your resume

What is the proper technique for emailing your cover letter and resume in MS-Word format? (The company is asking for cover letter and resume in MS-word format).

So what do you put in the body of the email?

Dear so-n-so:

Attached are my cover letter and resume in MS-Word format. If there are any problems, please contact me at...

Sincerely,

me!

So something like I typed above except with real english?

Thanks.

Dennis P.
Monday, January 26, 2004

I make the email my cover letter and attach the resume. It works well.

Monday, January 26, 2004

To elaborate on no-name's advice, the body of the email should be your cover letter. You don't need to mention the technical details; since they asked for .doc attachments, presumably they know how to deal with them.

Martha
Monday, January 26, 2004

> The company is asking for cover letter and resume in MS-word format.

Given how inconsistent people are in using commas, it's tough to know whether they mean that, or whether they mean:

"The company is asking for cover letter, and resume in MS-word format"

Christopher Wells
Monday, January 26, 2004

It can't hurt to include the resume and cover letter twice, once in plain text in the email body and once in Word in attachments. This could help when attachments get lost when mail is forwarded, when someone with Word receives the email, etc.

Also, be sure to include your full name in the attachment file names, for the recipient's convenience.

Julian
Tuesday, January 27, 2004

It can hurt to attach the cover letter. As Philo said, you might find they save that instead of the resume.

I'd argue for the cover letter being the body text of the email, but there are drawbacks to any method.

Stephen Jones
Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Make sure the .doc you are attaching is not affected by a virus.
I have seen lot of mails with resume filtered out by companies mail filter because of .doc contained the macro virus.

I think its better to send RTF or PDF files or simple HTML rather than MS Word Docs.

Nitin

Nitin Bhide
Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Some mail user agents for Windows mishandle attachments.

I have seen interoperability problems between Outlook and, say, KMail for KDE.

I would always put plain-text (not HTML) contact information in the body of the email to give those who care a chance to recover from a software botch.

Another fallback I use is to post my resume to my web site, and mention the URL in the body of the email. That way, if the attachment fails, the recipient can get my resume without any further delay.

Of course, if the botch occurs with an HR flack then you are screwed anyway.

David Jones
Tuesday, January 27, 2004

"Another fallback I use is to post my resume to my web site, and mention the URL in the body of the email. That way, if the attachment fails, the recipient can get my resume without any further delay"

You assume that they will bother to collect it, of course.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004