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Today’s blog is an easy tip that will really help you impress recruiters at a first look, without ANY work. This small tip can get your resume, cover letter, and other application materials into the hands of a hiring manager quicker. It won’t guarantee you a job or an offer (you still need to be qualified!), but recruiters really appreciate it when you make their job a lot easier.
Does this sound good? Here goes!
Properly name all attachments that you include with your application!!!
How does this help recruiters while also helping you? Well, recruiters and HR get hundreds of resumes, cover letters, etc. to sift through, and many of them are named incorrectly or incoherently. Downloading and viewing such attachments then requires them to manually rename them to fit their company standards in order to keep a clear record. Since we can’t know every company’s approach to naming resumes, use the format down below to name relevant attachments, which are generally accepted and very appreciated by employers.
File: Resume
File Name Option 1: [YourLastName], [YourFirstName] – Resume
Example: Minkova, Alina – Resume.pdf
QUICK TIP: While you can send your resume as a .docx, it’s far less likely to get messed up when an employer downloads it as a PDF, due to lines not being able to shift as easily. Therefore, PDFs are recommended.
For any other kind of attachment, just change the name after the hyphen to the description of the file, such as a Cover Letter, Unofficial Transcript or Official Transcript, Professional References, etc.
Believe it or not, this saves recruiters a ton of time and makes your already great application far stronger, because of just a little thoughtfulness put into the organization of your file names. It also makes your attachments look cleaner when they are all similarly named, thus giving your application a more put-together look. Because it’s often so hard to find quick, easy tips that really don’t require you to do much but may make a difference in you getting called back, you should definitely try this out.
