What is a Plain Text or “ASCII” resume?
Plain text resumes (also called “ASCII Resumes”) are generally used by job seekers to… a) Post their resume to an online job site when copying/pasting a resume into a text box. b) Send their resume to an employer within the text box of an email message by copying and pasting. A Plain Text resume contains no special formatting, such as bold, italics, underlining, tabs, centering or special characters i.e. ( , , , ). As its name implies, a “Plain Text” resume only contains typed text. Every character in a Plain Text resume is exactly the same width and font size (including blank spaces, apostrophes, etc…). A Plain Text resume should be less than 65 characters wide. Plain Text resumes are typically not viewed by employers; rather, they are imported directly into databases which employers use to search for potential employees using keywords. Since employers are using keywords to search for Plain Text resumes, Plain Text resumes should have a KEYWORD section which contains industry word
