Uploading Your Resume to Job Boards or Company Websites

Before uploading your resume to a job board or company website, you’ll need to have it in an electronic format, preferably in a word processing program like Microsoft Word. Most likely, you’ve taken advantage of the formatting capability in the word processor to enhance the appearance of your resume. Keep in mind, though, that some job boards and websites don’t handle specialty formatting well. Therefore, you should have more than one version of your electronic resume available. For example, you may have one fully formatted version and another less fancy version saved as an .rtf file (some formatting is maintained) or a .txt file (no formatting). See your word processor’s “Save As” choices to determine what file types are available to you.

The two most common methods for uploading your resume include “browsing” to upload a file from your computer onto the website or “copy/pasting” your resume contents into the allotted area on a website.

Browsing: If the job board or company website uses the browsing method, you’ll generally have a BROWSE or UPLOAD button you can click to display an area for indicating where your electronic resume is located. You’ll need to indicate the drive/folder/document name for your resume. If you’ve specified the location correctly, your resume will be successfully uploaded to the website.

Copy/Pasting: Some job boards and company websites require you to copy/paste your resume contents into an area on the website or they offer this as an alternative to the Browse/Upload option. The copy/paste method requires you to click and drag your cursor through your entire resume document to highlight all the contents (or use a “Select All” choice in the word processor). Once the entire resume has been selected, use the word processor’s “Copy” option to store the contents of your resume in the computer’s clipboard. Then, move to the website area where you’ll be placing your resume and “Paste” the contents into that area. (When data has been copied to the clipboard, Paste is usually available as a right-click option on a Windows PC or through CMD+V on a Mac.)

Regardless of whether you use the Browsing or Copy/Pasting method, be sure to scroll through your entire resume as it appears on the job board or company site to verify that all the spacing and formatting appear correctly.

As a note, employers who monitor resumes on job board sites can choose to view only those resumes that were recently posted or updated. Therefore, it’s a good practice to periodically make an update to your uploaded resume, even if it’s a very minor one, in order to flag it as a recently updated resume.