The fifty. You start your job search, spending countless hours locating and researching relevant positions. The forty. You discover a great job with a highly reputable organization. The thirty. You submit your resume and wait patiently for several days. The twenty. You are invited to come in for an interview. The ten yard line! You have an incredible interview and can really see yourself working for this organization. You decide that it is time for a touchdown dance and spike the ball with excitement. You are promptly tackled at the goal line. You did not get the job.

Just as a football player should not stop running with the ball until he scores a touchdown, you should not stop doing whatever it takes to get hired until you are actually hired. No early celebrations.

So what will take you from the ten-yard line into the end zone? The answer is simple: a well written, persuasive thank-you letter.

Why Is a Thank-You Letter Important?

A thank-you letter is highly important for the following reasons:

1. If well-written and sincere, it will show that you are extremely serious about the job.
2. It gives you one final chance to connect your strengths to the specific requirements of the position.
3. It makes you stand out from other candidates who have not sent a letter.
4. For competitive positions with longer decision times and a plethora of applicants, a strategically timed letter can renew the interviewer’s interest in you.

Accordingly, be sure to send a thank-you letter out to every interviewer that you meet with. Don’t throw away all of your hard work because of laziness or cockiness.

If you need help, we offer professional and affordable Thank-You Letter Editing.

Many employers now require cover letters and resumes to be submitted electronically. However, this presents an obvious problem: how do you sign your cover letter?

There are a few obvious but unacceptable solutions:

• Typing your signature with a cursive font like this: John Doe. This looks incredibly tacky and unprofessional.
• Typing /s/ then your name like this: /s/ John Doe. This is a better solution but tends to suggest that you did not have the time to actually sign the document. It is also not as sincere as an actual signature.
• Printing out the cover letter, signing it, and then scanning it back in. This wastes a ton of time, especially if you have a large number of applications to send out.

None of these are ideal.

The Ideal Solution: an Electronic Version of Your Handwritten Signature

The ideal solution is to create an electronic version of your handwritten signature. This is an incredibly easy process that we have reduced to five straightforward steps.

Here’s what you will need:

• Camera Phone
• Microsoft Paint
• Microsoft Word (this tutorial uses Word 2010)

Step One: Write Your Signature on a White Sheet of Paper

Sign your name in the middle of a regular sheet of white paper. You will achieve best results with a pen that produces thicker ink, such as a Sharpie pen.

Step Two: Take a Picture of Your Signature

Use your phone to take a picture of your signature. Try to get as close as possible, and find a position that does not cast a shadow on the sheet of paper. Note: if you have a scanner, you can just scan the paper in and skip some of the following steps.

You then need to get the photo from your phone to your computer. You can do this simply by emailing the photo to yourself, selecting “actual size” when prompted.

Step Three: Edit Your Photo in Microsoft Paint

Open your image in Microsoft paint by right clicking on the icon and selecting “Open With.”

After opening the photo, you will notice that it is huge and rotated on its side.

First, click the resize button as shown in the following photo. Then resize by percentage, reducing the size from 100% to 25% as shown.

After making the photo smaller, select the rotate button and choose “Rotate right 90 degrees” as shown.

Next, you will notice that the paper itself takes up most of your photo. Select only the signature area using the rectangular select tool. Then press the Crop button as shown.

After cropping the photo, save your photo as a JPEG image.

Step Four: Eliminate the Dark Background in Microsoft Word

Open up Microsoft Word. Under the Insert tab, select Picture and choose the edited photo that you saved from Microsoft Paint. This is what the image will look like. As you can see, we still have the dark background from the shadows on the paper itself.

To remove the dark background area, click on the Photo and then select the Corrections menu. Select the option with the whitest background, as shown below.

Next, select the photo and open the Artistic Effects menu. Select the option that has the whitest background as shown.

Note: if these two steps do not completely remove the background, then click on the Corrections menu and then choose Picture Corrections Options. Play with the brightness and contrast sliders until the background is completely white.

The end result is shown in the picture below. Right click on it and choose Save as Picture.

When saving your signature, make sure it is in JPEG format as shown below.

The final result will be a signature image as shown below.

Step Five: Insert Your Final Signature Into Microsoft Word Whenever You Need to Sign Anything!

After importing your signature into your cover letter, resize it so it is smaller and matches the rest of the text. Here is the end result.

You can now import your signature into any document that you need to sign. Please comment if you have any questions. Good luck!