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From: "Bill Horne" <bill at horne.net> Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 17:21:07 -0500 Well, I'll jump back in, briefly. 1. Ordered lists A. It's a PITA to do ordered and/or bulleted lists in text. In the first place, the placement of tabs must be calculated so as to ensure that none of the lines autowraps into the gutter. B. You don't know what the recipient's tab stops are set to, nor their line wrap. C. Getting your cover letter to stand out shouldn't involve doing ASCII art. It's easy, then: limit your lines to 72 characters, and use spaces rather than tabs. I usually do bullets this: * Here's a top level bullet. Here's the explanatory text. As you can see, I've indented this all of two spaces, and auto fill mode in emacs limits my lines to 72 characters. + I personally like to do sub-bullets like this. The indentation stays light, but it's still easy to see the organization. While a proportional font will *slightly* mess this up, it's going to be very minor. If you have that many bullets that this is going to look clunky, then you simply have too many bullets for a cover letter. IMHO the cover letter should consist of paragraphs rather than bullets, anyway. 2. Readability A. Many of the respondents feel that hiring managers use non-HTML-capable email programs, and I don't think that's a productive assumption. I'm speaking as a hiring manager myself. While I won't say that all hiring managers do this, some do. But even that's neither here nor there because... 1. The cover letter almost always goes to HR before the hiring manager, and HR doesn't know that "plain text" exists. Our HR organization explicitly prefers that resumes be entered into our job site in text (in fact, we only permit on-line submission as ASCII text). Our resume system is set up for plain text. B. HTML rendering engines do make allowances for paragraph leading, margin matching, and justification that just can't be done in plain text. I want my cover letter to stand out, but not be so unusual as to be offputting. I don't think I've yet seen a cover letter that really "stands out" in a positive way. If it's going to, it's going to stand out by being concise yet compelling. Neatly formatted ASCII isn't going to make a difference; demonstrating to me why you're special does. C. Readability is in the eye of the beholder. If someone has been clicking through dozens of HTML-formatted emails, and then comes upon mine in plain-text, it will look drab by comparison. Of course, if you hit that hiring manager that uses a console-based mail reader, your HTML-formatted email *is* going to stand out -- badly. At least use both text and HTML. Likewise for the resume; if you must send it in Word format, also send it in text format. PDF may be a better choice than Word, anyway. 3. Compatibility A. Like it or don't, M$ products are the corporate standard - why else would we submit a r)B?sum? in MS Word format? - WHICH Word format? B. Whatever one might be used to in the Unix world, one must get past the HR process to be able to use it. Ergo, HTML. See above regarding HR policies.
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