Naming (Filename) Your Resume

You have been a super star professional and your resume says it all - regular promotions, spectacular achievements, top-education,  strong references and spot-less formatting. Yet, you did not get any response in last few months from any recruiter! Think why?

The answer is a straight-forward one if seen from the recruiter's (our) perspective. For instance, we received 250 responses as result of a job-post. When we started saving the resume from the emails, over a 100 had filenames such as "CV", ''resume'', ''mycv1'', ''myresume1'', etc

Do you think we would rename all of those attachments and take the pain to short-list all over again? They hardly get renamed and end up being lost on our computer's hard-disk.

It is imperative to understand you are selling yourself during the process of job search. To this extent, this process is pure marketing. And for making you a perfect marketer, following are some of the observations you need to rectify for naming your resume and sending to us.

1. Resume.doc : Do not name your resume as "resume.doc'' either it will get lost on my hard disk or it will easily be replaced with another resume with the same file name. Best way is to put your full name and distinguish your area of specialization. For example; "Ahmad Ali - PHP Developer"
2. Use Capital Letters: Use the proper case while naming your resume using capital letters where required. For example "Ahmad Ali - PHP Developer"
3. Version 3.0: We understand you are good with version management but keep it to yourself when sending out a resume. Do not include a version number on your filename - we are not interested to know how many time you have updated your resume.
4. Date or Year: And we are also not interested to view the date/year you created or modified your resume. Plus imagine if you send a resume with an old date - what will we think of it? You do not want to leave such a first impression
5. Filenamewithwordswithoutspace: Trouble reading the heading? Exactly!! Resume with a file name like ''ahmadalijavalatest.doc'' is not at all easy for us to read. Use proper word spacing while naming the resume file.
6. Misspelled Word: One of the most ancient rule - do not make spelling mistakes or typos neither inside the resume, nor in the file name. This is the very basics - we do not like it at all
7. Nicknames Are For Home: Leave the nicknames for home, not naming your resume. It sounds informal and unprofessional seeing a nickname on the resume file name.

By now, I am sure you would be thinking, you did one of the above mistakes with your resume and its file-name! Do not worry though, that's why this article is written so that you gain insight and correct it for future.

Wondering who would go in such minute details? - We do!!  As they say, the devil is in the details!

Good luck!