One of the most effective and efficient way of submitting your resume is to send an e-mail with your resume as attached document to a list of employers. Do not use bold, italic, underline or very larger or very small fonts for a resume intended for submitting via e-mail. Many of the big employers will use a computer program to scan the resume into an electronic document retrieval system. Special effect characters and characters too large or small may make the scanning and OCR process difficult, and consequently reduce your opportunity. Use TEXT format for the resume.
Word processors embeds special characters into the documents for all kinds of purposes.
The scanning and OCR program may not understand those special characters. Even if the resume is retrieved by a human worker, she or he may not have the same word processor you use. Make things easier for others and yourself - use TEXT format. Chances are that your resume will be scanned, processed, and stay in a database for six months. As soon as there is an opening, a query will run against the database.