As a job hunter you’re going to be sending out plenty of resumes and cover letters to prospective employers. I’m going to describe what I find works best when you submit these items.

I’ve received hundreds of resumes and cover letters over the course of my work with GoGeomatics and the job board. So as a headhunter for geomatics, I know what I like to get and have talked to others in the industry about what they like getting. It’s all about putting your best foot forward after all.

Unless a job ad tells you to submit a resume in a certain format, I suggest you send two files with your email. Submit a separate cover and resume in PDF format. Do this because you don’t know what software they are going to be using on the other end, and you don’t want the resume and cover letter you spent time on being mangled by the employers’ software.

As well send your resume with the following file naming convention:

       YourName_JobTitle_Resume.PDF

       YourName_JobTitle_CoverLetter.PDF

It would look like this in practice:

       JonathanMurphy_GISAnalyst_Resume.PDF

       JonathanMurphy_GISAnalyst_CoverLetter.PDF

There’s no hard and fast rule to this, but I find it is the best format for receiving documents. When receiving sometimes ten to twenty applications a day, this makes format makes it easy for me to find your information and keep track of it. I know whom the files are from, what job you are interested in, and what I will find in each file.

Why not put the cover and resume in the same file? Well sometimes I am forwarding your resume to a client for review and I need to pull the cover letter out of it and I don’t want to mess with the file and the formatting. At times I will write my own synopsis and forward that to the client.