CV File Names and Formats

I recently had to sift through a big bunch of resumes for a role. I filtered them based on a manual review, and then saved them into a new directory.

It was then that I realised that a number of the candidates were missing an opportunity here to promote their personal brand.

Simpley naming your resume “cv.doc” or “resume2012.pdf” is not very inspiring and also by the time the recruiter has 15 resumes in the pile, you can almost guarantee that there will be some duplicate file names based on CV which means I’ll have 2 files, one of which ends up beaing called CV(1).doc.

Now technically there’s nothing wrong with this, but how is the recruiter supposed to know which is which. He may now want to pull yours out of the pile, and he doesn’t know which one it is! Why make it hard? – the last thing you should be doing is placing obstacles in the way, so here’s a few simple thoughts:

• Name your file something meaningful like “Mike_Wood_Resume.doc” or “CV_Mike_Wood.doc”
• Notice the use of underscores rather than spaces. OK this is a throw back to old computer file naming days, but why risk potential incompatibilities with tracking systems.
• Also while we’re at it, how about file format? Doc, RTF, Docx or PDF? Personally I’d always save it in a nice easy doc version. Not all systems manage PDFs very well, so a DOC is probably the best.

So there you are, it doesn’t take a moment to save your file and give it a name, but when you do, give it a little thought.