Guest Author - Meredith Eisenberg

First Impressions Count � Online too!

My favorite part of job hunting used to be putting together my resume package. I would spend literally hours in the office supply store looking at all variety of beautiful resume papers and envelopes. I wanted to make an excellent impression from the get-go. Today, most of us do our initial job applications via the Internet. How to do you make a great first impression virtually? Here are some tips putting your best foot forward in your online job search.

1. Your email address counts. Make sure that you have a professional (and stable email address). Employers are not likely to take you very seriously if your email is susiesmommy@aol.com or kitten69@earthlink.net. As it gets easier to register domains, personal email addresses are beginning to come across as very amateurish and unprofessional. There are a number of hosting companies that will let you register your name as your domain for a small monthly fee. Or, companies like itzoom.com will let you set up a very professional �alias� such as Meredith@itprofessional.com that forwards to your current email for free.
2. Observe basic email etiquette. As with the email address, what works for personal email doesn�t necessarily work for business. Limit the use of cute smiley faces and other icons. Many corporate servers block these anyway. If you are sending html based email, keep the colors and fonts to a minimum. Also, think twice before using Outlook stationery because it doesn�t show up in many email programs and can make your message quite large. Limit the use of ALL CAPS and excessive exclamation points.
3. Let your subject line tell the story. Workers today sift through hundreds of emails a day. Make sure your message gets read by summarizing the content of the message in the subject line. This will also help your message avoid an over zealous spam filter . Also, try to avoid one word responses to emails such as �thanks� or �me too�.
4. Read the email out loud before you send it. In this era of quick communication, it is really easy to quickly fire off an email with significant typos and spelling errors. One method for making sure that your important messages say what they are supposed to say is to save a draft and read the email a few hours later. If you need to get a response back quickly, you can read the message out loud. Reading out loud helps you catch the errors that your eyes automatically skip over.
5. Check before you send an attachment. Many corporate servers have extreme limits on attachment sizes. Once a mail box is full the owner cannot receive any more messages. An alternative might be to post the information online or compress the file using a .zip file.
6. Finally always include a signature with contact information and maybe a little information about what you can offer.

Hopefully, by following these tips, you can put your best foot forward online.