Jobseekers and resume writers have strived for years to develop ways to make resumes visually appealing and graphically interesting - through font choices, bold and italic type, rule lines, bullets, centering, indents, and more - only to have all that formatting thrown out the window in the e-resume world. Text-based e-resumes are the antitheses of the gorgeous documents that job seekers hand to employers at interviews and career fairs. The fact is that most e-resumes are not intended to be visually attractive because their main function is not to be seen but to be searched in keyword-searchable databases.

Still, they may be seen at some point. Employers may see the resume you've posted on an online job board. Their primary interest is whether the content of your resume (indicated largely by keywords) shows you to be qualified for the opening you've applied for and/or for which the employer is searching the database. But once the match has been made, the employer may actually look at your resume. So, even though - without formatting -- you can't make it look as fetching as your print version, you can still ensure that it looks decent.

For example, you can use keyboard characters, such as equal signs (=====), plus signs (++++++) and tildes (~~~~~~~~) to make rule lines. You can use asterisks (*****), hyphens (-----), lower-case letter o's (ooooo), and carats (>>>>) to make bullets. You can use UPPER CASE for emphasis in headings.