What produces more return calls from technology contract recruiters --
faxed resumes or e-mailed resumes?

I know from personal experience that, as of the mid-90's, faxed
resumes brought about 10-20 *times* greater volume of response than
e-mail.  I would have thought that recruiters would be more tech-savvy
now, but I'm still seeing indicators which lead me to believe
otherwise; e-mail responses in ALL CAPS, failure to follow the URL in
the e-mailed text reseume in order to get a formatted version, etc. 
There are still some here (Silicon Valley area) who only publish their
fax number on their web site, and so on.

Any ideas?

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Clarification of Question by stevegt-ga on 06 May 2002 09:14 PDT

Note that I say "contract recruiters", as in brokers, at agencies, not
in-house HR recruiters.  The comments so far seem to be regarding the
latter.

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Clarification of Question by stevegt-ga on 06 May 2002 09:20 PDT

This question applies when an agency provides both fax and e-mail
addresses.  I'm not suggesting ignoring specific instructions which
ask for mail only. Likewise, I'm not suggesting social engineering to
get a fax number the agency hasn't explicitly published.

Hi stevegt-ga,
From my personal experience, it basically depends on the company
style. But almost all the companies now prefer to have resumes via
emails than Fax. Because of technology moving in all the companies,
everyone is moving towards paperless office style. Having resumes in
email is much easy to handle and to maintain. Fax is more difficult to
organize and its time consuming and less cost effective as compared to
emails.
Now regarding getting more calls for email resume or fax resume, I
don't think this matters at all. All that matters is that how much a
company in need for that position and how much your resume style and
experience influence the company recruiter. Its all the first
impression that matters here along with the matching of your
experience with the requirements of the company.

Check out this link which says that email is better than fax.
http://www.nilesrecruiting.com/resume.html#Emailvsfaxdetail

Also check out this link:
http://www.careerconsulting.com/faq.htm

A survey states that about 48% of employers prefer email resumes and
11% prefer fax resume.
http://www.quintcareers.com/QuintZine/archives/20011112.html

Another survey "SENDING RESUMES BY E-MAIL" also says a similar words.
Check this site to get this survey details:
http://www.law.wayne.edu/Career/Alum%20Newsletter/ANewsletters%202001/febuary%202001.PDF

I hope this will answer your answer upto your satisfaction.

Regards,
netcrazy-ga

Good research.  The survey you referenced was exactly what I was looking for.

Hello stevegt-ga,

I can comment about how our company does this. We want ALL of the
resumes that we receive to be sent to us via email. We do NOT prefer
fax or snail mail.

If a person goes to our website, the will see that they are suppose to
send their resume to resume@ourcompany.com and not to sales@, info@ or
webmaster@. People that do not send it to the right address are put in
a different folder then the rest of the resumes. This also goes for
the ones that are faxed in and mailed in.

We look at it this way, if the person cannot follow simple directions
on where to send their resume then they will probably not make a good
employee.

One more thing, the ones that send their resume to the right place are
also in 2 categories. The first one is the ones that label their file
"resume-their-name.doc and or .pdf" the others are the ones that just
send "resume.doc or resume.pdf". Needless to say the ones that
actually put the resume-their-name.doc are considered first.

Now this is just the way our company does things (and no, I do not
work for Google). People that I talk to in other companies that we
deal with are also doing similar things. So I hope this information
helps you our some.

Regards,

Interceptor-ga

I will echo interceptor-ga's response.  Even though faxing used to be
the standard, more and more offices are becoming closer and closer to
paperless.  Unless specified, I would make sure to email instead of
faxing.  If the company you email your resume to needs a hard copy,
they should be able to print it out.

Regards,

Nearly everyone wants e-mail.

There are some good ideas on soft copy resumes at
www.monsterboard.com.

You may also want to remember that the old logic of resumes was
"action verbs" like "Accomplished"  BUT...now with soft copy people
tend to search for nouns like "carpenter" or the names of software
titles you know.