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Any employer will hire an individual as long as the employer is convinced that the hiring will bring more value than it costs.

This little gem is from the people at Executive Support Services. In a fit of contrarianism, they say that

The purpose of a Résumé is to help you get an interview. Since employers spend a mere 30 - 40 seconds reviewing your Résumé, care must be taken to convey your strengths and other qualifications in an easy readable format. The Résumé also acts as an agenda for the interview and serves as a memory jogger in gaining additional information that might have been missed during the interview or to reinforce ideas covered in that session.

The company offers personal marketing packages and seems to have their arms around resume development better than most. We wonder, though, if they've ever heard of resume scanners.

Now, go look at the Main Quad. Their "mission" is:

The Main Quad is a global community of college students. Our community is not defined by GPA, demographics or geography, but by what we call our "Quad values": innovation, motivation, integrity, and community. The Main Quad is for oboe players, Rhodes scholars, athletes, or anyone else who shares the Quad values. We're striving to build a community full of global, intelligent, and thought-provoking people and content.

They do it by offering tools of real value and significance. You're going to love Extreme Resume Drop which is a collection of tools for job hunters. It's safe to say that it's the most focused and useful set of tools currently on the net. Their absolutely amazing offerings include:

• Extreme Resume Drop which is a free service that allows you to copy, paste and ship your resume and cover letter directly to over 175 companies, associations and non-profits. All at the click of a button. This service is so incredible that we think your resume submittal process should begin here.

• Extreme Recruiting is a comprehensive tutorial on the resume scanning systems and technology that we've been telling you about. The tone of the three articles in this section goes the distance as a tool for demystifying resume scanning. They also offer very sound tips for improving the format content and layout of your resume.

• To round things out, Main Quad offers a Resume Creator. Using a form input that is somewhere between the simple Tripod form and Intellimatch's skills inventory, the Resume Creator will take you through the steps of creating an HTML resume. Main Quad offers free account space and elsewhere in the site, they offer the "stuff" required to really dress your fledgling website/resume for success.

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• The Recipient (this is the To: line )
• Courtesy Copies (this is usually designated cc: )
• Blind Courtesy Copies (bcc:)

If you choose to send your resume to a large number of people with one piece of email, it's very important to use the bcc: line for the bulk addresses. Otherwise, the information you are trying to send will be lost in an overwhelming sea of addresses. Although many people who receive electronic resumes automatically enter them in databases without reading them, some of the people on your list actually read the material. Imagine being faced with an email that starts with hundreds of lines of email addresses. The resume and cover letter will never get read.

Worse yet, many resume databases will simply ignore mail that they can't quickly categorize.

Even more frightening is the prospect that one of your recipients will decide to respond to your email and send a copy to everyone on your list. Imagine sending your credentials package to a thousand people and then having someone send a reply to that same thousand reading "Who is this bozo?". The bcc: line protects you and the people on your list from this sort of intrusion.

Bulk emailing your resume is a survival tactic on the net. With thousands of potential employers and an endless sea of opportunity, it's an appropriate response. But, if you execute it poorly, it's a reflection on your technical skills and competence. There are several things to consider:

• Always include a cover letter. It may not get read by anyone but it's a coutesy to people who do read the resumes they get.

• Don't ever send anything to "Dear Sirs; Gentlemen; Sir or Madam;or, To Whom It may concern". Email generally goes to an individual or a machine. Because of the way email works, it's common practice to leave a salutation off rather than appear to be sending generic material.

• Keep Your Cover Letter short. 10 to 12 lines is a lot. You are asking people to take time with your credentials, it's your job to make it interesting in a short space.

• Have Keywords at the bottom of your credentials. Many resumes go directly to databases without being read. You want to make sure that a database search will find you.

• Assume that no feedback means that your note was ignored. Try to improve it in a way that makes it more interesting to your audience. Then Send it again.

• Some people won't like the way that you do things. It's very easy to reply to email and you will get a surprising number of negative responses to your credentials package. Just anticipate negative responses and move on. (It may be that some of the responses that you find negative at first contain valuable constructive feedback.)

• If you get feedback that you find "negative", only reply to it with a "Thank You" or an Apology. Period. If you're using a list, you're bound to hit someone on a bad day. Since you've asked for their time, you must deal with their reactions. A Job Hunt is not a good time to exercise your "self-righteousness" muscles.

• Keep your expectations in line. A very good response rate is 2%. (Expect well under 1%). The way to increase the number of people who respond is by making your material more interesting and sending to more of them.

Sending out bulk resumes to long email lists is a fact of life in the electronic Job Hunt. Done effectively, it is a major time saver. Done ineffectively, it can seriously interfere with your day.

Bulk email works. You can research your own list or start with our Recruiter's database.