Resume Tip: Five Ways To Prevent Emailed Resumes From Getting Blocked as Spam

If you’re looking for work and creating a resume, you should not only carefully review the resume, but also consider some tactics to make sure your emailed resume isn’t getting lost in employers’ spam email filters.

If you’re on the hiring side of the desk, check for the same problem, which may be be preventing you from seeing the resumes of highly qualified candidates.

When this post was originally written in October 2004, the Wall Street Journal had just reported on this problem of the growing use of spam filtering technology and its potential interference with emailed resumes (excerpted here).

Spam-filtering technology has improved since then, while spammers have changed methods, so we’ve expanded, updated, and republished this post to help today’s jobseekers with the following resume tips.

photo credit: dok1 via flickr

1. When Creating a Resume, Avoid Problematic, “Spammy” Words.

According to this WSJ article, some good resumes are filtered out as spam due to the use of specific “bad” words common in spam:

The mere presence of words such as “free,” “expand,” “trial,” “mortgage,” or exclamation points or colored backgrounds — all of which might be used by resume writers as well as spammers — could trigger some filters.

The WSJ told the story of an applicant who had received his MBA degree magna cum laude. Who wouldn’t want to list that honor in their resume?

However, spam filters have a little problem with the word “cum,” because of its less honorable meaning, as this applicant learned when a company informed him that his resume had been deleted from its system because it contained an “obscenity.”

He fixed the problem: His resume now says he graduated with “high honors.”

Similarly, while creating a resume to be emailed, think about the words you use and whether you commonly see them in the spam you receive. Those “spammy” words may relate to:

• Types of products and services commonly marketed through spam (be careful if you’ve brokered mortgages or sold pharamaceuticals!).
• Sales pitch adjectives like “free” or “best.”
• Dollar amounts. It may be important to include on your resume how much your average sales were, how much you increased revenues, etc., but beware: dollar amounts are common to spam, either in prices or as part of the sales pitch (such as “make over $10,000 a month with Google”).

2. When Emailing a Resume, Avoid Transmission Methods and Formats That Set Off Spam Filters

Spam filters don’t just hunt for “bad” words. They have become increasingly sophisticated, using “whitelists,” and “blacklists,” and examining many attributes of email, including the ISP (Internet Service Provider) from which email originates.

Beware Attachments!

Many jobseekers send a cover letter and/or resume as an attachment to an email.

Many company IT systems view attachments with suspicion, as they can contain toxic virus payloads. Some with strict email regimes will not allow attachments from any other than whitelisted senders.

Far better to just copy and paste the resume in the email, following the cover letter content.

Mass Emailing Problems and Solutions

Mass emailing is viewed with suspicion by many spam filters. After all, that’s how spam goes out — to thousands or millions of addressees at once.

Mass emailing may never even reach your addressees’ spam filters, as it may be stopped short by your own ISP, which wants to avoid getting blacklisted as a haven for spammers by other ISPs and by spam filters.

Of course, it’s also true an employer may not be too impressed with your professed interest in their company if they see you also sent the identical cover letter and resume to 50 other addressees.

You can set up your email so this fact is not evident to humans, such as by putting the mailing list in the “bcc” box, rather than the “to” box. But spam filters are not so easily fooled, and can readily detect that an email was mass-mailed.

There are services that promise to send your resumeto many recruiters or employers. They may be legitimate and helpful, but you should always inquire about how they handle the issue of spam blocking. They should be able to provide statistics on how many of your emails got through to the recipient and how many were opened.

There are also reputable email marketing companies that specialize in handling mass business emails, such as newsletters. (Such email is not spam because it’s sent to customers and others who have “opted in” to mailing lists.)

The best of these services have many features to maximize email deliverability, including pretesting for “spamminess” and providing reliable statistics on who does and does not receive emails.

A jobhunter could sign up for a service such as Constant Contact, which I have successfully used, to use it for mass emailing potential employers. (Constant Contact offers a free trial.)

Problematic Formatting to Avoid When Creating a Resume for Emailing

The following are some formatting choices that may look “spammy” to the ISPs and spam filters:

• HTML, rather than plain text. (If your email application lets you change font style, color, and size in your e-mail, it’s in html mode.) Sure, HTML makes email more attractive, by varying colors and fonts, and can do some layout tricks. But much spam is HTML-formatted, for that very reason, so html formatting may be a spam red flag.
• Lots of hyperlinks. These are often found in spam as well.
• Brightly colored fonts (e.g., red, green, or purple).
• Lots of ALL CAPS.
• Lots of question marks and/or exclamation points????!!!!!!

3. Think Hard About your Subject Line

Most people make a very quick delete-or-save decision based on an email’s subject line. This may be your only chance to grab their attention.

If you’re applying for a specific position, obviously you want to reference that, probably with a few words of self-promotion, maybe something like this:

Employment atty. w/ 5+ yrs. exp., for advertised legal dept. opening.

4. Run Your Cover Letter and Resume Through a Spam Checker.

There are sites you can use to test your email for likelihood of triggering spam filters, such as this one.

5. Don’t Rely Solely on Email to Transmit Your Resume.

Busy business people are accustomed to disposing very quickly of emails. If they don’t, they’ll never get to work. (I use an immediate “triage” — deal with today; get to in the next few weeks, and get to “someday.”)

Resumes, especially unsolicited ones, are not likely to get much notice if sent by email without first laying the groundwork more conventionally by phone or personal networking.

If you don’t first lay the groundwork this way, at least follow up with a phone call and copy sent by regular mail. Many people (fewer every year!) still function largely in the “paper world,” preferring a resume they can hold in their hand, mark on, and sort manually.