According to research by Palladian Career Resources, the filename of a résumé is an often-overlooked detail by many job seekers. Palladian surveyed résumés and identified best practices and common mistakes.

When writing a résumé, the name of the file is a detail low in importance for most job seekers. Unfortunately, this leads many to disregard the filename. Palladian completed a study of filenames used by actual job seekers for their résumés and identified a number of common mistakes and best practices.

Filenames Containing the Job Seeker's Name

In the study, Palladian indentified four elements that routinely appear in the filenames of resume. The most common was an indication of the job seeker's name. Also common were the word "resume," a version number of the resume and the date the resume was written.

Job Seeker's Name: Ninety-two percent of résumé had some indication of the candidate's name, but only fifty-eight percent contained both the first and last name. Nine percent of the resumes had no reference to the candidate, with files names like "resume," "myresume" and "resume2009." The remainder had some reference to the candidate, a first name, a last name or initials, but did not contain both the first and last name.
 
Other Information: A large percentage of résumé filenames contained information of no value to a hiring manager. Two common items were the date the résumé was written and the version number of the résumé. There were job seekers that put information in the filename that had no meaning. In some cases, it looked like the job seeker used the résumé of someone else as a template, since the filename contained a different person's name. Others had random words that seemed to have no meaning.
 
File Format: By far, the most common file format was the Microsoft Word 2003 - a .doc file. There were also pdf, rtf, wps and docx file formats, along with one format that could not be identified.

Best Practices
--Use your first and last name in the file name.
--Include the word "résumé"
--Include a keyword phrase (1 to 3 words summarizing your job or industry)
--Separate words with hyphens
--Submit your résumé in a Microsoft Word 2003 format (.doc)

Structure of a good résumé filename: FirstName-LastName-Resume-KeywordPhrase.doc

Example: John-Doe-Resume-Logistics-Manager.doc

Source: Career Management Alliance

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