Guidelines for Emailing a Military Resume

Afraid your military resume is heading straight for a spam folder? Here’s how to increase the odds of your military resume being read by a recruiter or hiring manager when sending it via email.

The first question about e-mailing your military resume is whether to send it as an attachment or just paste it into the body of the email. Keep in mind that attachments may take up too much space in the recipient’s inbox, harbor security threats, or get blocked by a company’s security system. Furthermore, busy hiring professionals may not take the time to open an attachment. However, Word or PDF attachments are more attractively formatted than pasted-in text resumes and PDF attachments can’t be messed with. So what is a military job seeker to do?

• Try to do exactly what the company or hiring professional requested or find out what they prefer.
• When in doubt, try sending your military resume both ways; consider sending two e-mails: one with the military resume pasted in and one with the military resume pasted in as well as attached.

If you plan to paste your military resume into an e-mail, start the e-mail with a brief introduction of yourself (two paragraphs of two to three lines each, max) in place of a military cover letter. At the end of the introduction, indicate that you’ve pasted in your military resume following your signature and, of course, copy and paste your military resume accordingly. Here are some tips for formatting your pasted-in military resume.

• Keep each line short – between 45 and 60 characters.
• Use spaces instead of tabs for indenting.
• Use capitalization instead of bolding to emphasize text.
• Do not use exclamation marks in the subject line or body of the military resume.

A great way to get a hiring professional’s attention is to identify an issue or offer a solution within the subject line. This is an example of an attention-grabbing subject header: “Re: reducing operating costs by 20%”. And finally, make sure you follow-up, by phone, to ensure your military resume was accepted.

Now that you have positioned yourself for emailing success, you may be eager to hit the send button. Not so fast! Squeaking by the spam filter will do you no good with an ineffective military resume. It’s your resume’s job to land you an interview in this scenario. To accomplish this, your military resume should convey your ability to fulfill critical hiring needs within the target organization. Consider consulting the professional military resume writers at Military Resumes to ensure your military resume, newly received and read, makes the best first impression possible.