Is there some reason that recruiters and headhunters want resumes in Word format, beyond the fact that that's just all they're familiar with?

Years ago I rewrote my resume in TeX so that I could manage it easily and easily produce a PDF of it. And every time I want to send it out, it's all "do you have this in Word format?"

It's even more infuriating when you're applying for a Unix Admin position. Really? You're really requiring me to use a computer program that doesn't exist for the systems I'm applying to work on, and which produces inferior output to what I've already given you? It seems to me that this is like applying for a job as a chef de cuisine and one of the hurdles being to make a McDonald's hamburger.

Word as a resume format just bothers me in general. It's easily changeable by default, leading to potential fat fingers when someone tries to print it, thus making you look bad. Layout is not guaranteed to remain the same version to version. And if you use a non standard font, it becomes a hassle on the other side to ensure it comes out looking right.

I guess these reasons haven't crossed recruiters minds.

Even worse was the apartment I am moving to. They sent me:
1 form in Excel, legal paper layout
2 forms in Word, one legal, one letter
1 form in WordPerfect, legal layout

Office and iWork on the Mac won't open Word Perfect files, and a free program botched the formatting badly. Had to take it into work and use Word 2010+Adobe PDF addon to save it back out as a PDF in the proper layout.

Since a headhunter works for you and only makes money when you get hired, I would think they'd take whatever format you tell them to take.

I'm not aware of anyone who can't open a PDF on any platform. Certainly many more than can do anything with a Word file.

They can slap their header on the Word version of your resume. This is something that irks me, my resume is mine, don't fritz with it.

I don't think there's any other reason.
I am surprised they are not just as familiar with PDFs, though.

In any case, recruiters are not techies. To many, there's a program to "type" and the idea to use another one to generate a "better" version of the document they produced is just silly and complicated.
And they're right.
From the user experience perspective, it is just silly that word processor X (MS Word, or whatever other you may like) does not produce a finalized, universally accesible, unchangeable version of their work.

So, one may argue that Word does that, but it is not obvious nor user friendly.
One may argue on what is universally accessible, and unchangeable. But the point, from the user experience, remains.

I share completely your frustration and your arguments. I happened to interview people in the past, and never wanted a CV on Word (which I like, and use daily); I always asked for a PDF version, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

I was amazed to how many people produce WordPerfect, or MS Wordpad. Once I got a CV in HTML, once a PPT presentation file, and once I got one in Flash.

But, I think you'd be wrong to expect that somebody who uses a PC to type letters and sees it as an advanced typewriter which occasionally can be used to listen to music and browse the net, may ask for any other format than the one they use daily to produce text (<- not it jargon) documents.

My advice: get over it: while technically non-optimal, it is perfectly normal that people want Word; just don't be irritated, see if you can convince them to get a PDF - which seems to me perfectly reasonable -, and if you don't succeed, just produce a Word file. I'm sure there's converters out there for those who don't want to install Office on their desktop computers.

Oh. Interesting. Here you need to add some legal stuff at the end of your CV to allow them to use it within legal boudaries set by law on privacy, otherwise they theoretically cannot share it with anybody else. They definitely cannot edit its content unless you give them permission to do so.

How else are they going to add skills you don't possess to your resume and submit you for jobs you aren't qualified to perform? It's not like they can use any other word processor besides Word.

It's not just resumes -- Word is the default application that many people open up to write just about anything, which leads to people sending out emails that consist of nothing but a Word attachment, and nothing but text inside the Word document. With the advent and popularization of Sharepoint, this will only get worse, as people will think of the Office formats as universal (if they don't already.)

For resumes, I think it's just the groupthink of wanting to use what everyone else uses. Also, PDF wasn't always very well-supported on Windows -- I don't use it anymore, but when I did, my Windows systems were more likely to have Office on them than Acrobat Reader. These days the gap is probably narrower, but people don't change their behavior overnight.

I thought it also might have something to do with resume scanning systems being optimized for Word, but that may not be the case.

This is what they do in the UK. Firstly, they want to remove your contact details, so that the company can't get in touch with you directly. So they replace your header with theirs. Secondly, there's a list of things that hiring processes can't discriminate against, legally, so the recruitment consultants remove things such as age, nationality and marital status. Thirdly, and here we're on shaky ground, they might tweak it to make relevant skills for the position stand out. Finally, disreputable recruiters will flat out lie on your CV when passing it on.

... well, if they are supposed to >edit< your CV, of course they won't want it in PDF.

Yeah, there are, and they suck.

And how about those of us who can't install Office? Last I heard, it didn't run on Linux.

Or how about those that don't want to pay (at least) $125 for software that we legitimately believe sucks ass?

I'm considering redoing my resume in XML and then writing a program that will take that and wrap it in RTF. Which sucks even more than Word does, but at least it's vaguely an open standard, and one that Word can deal with.

Alternately, I might consider just wrapping the PDF in DOC container. I don't know if that's possible or not.

VM? Or, doesn't OO save in at least some old word format (6.0 will be more than ok for a CV)?



I think you are confusing your cursade anti-MS (legitimate like any other opinion) with the simple fact that expecting a de-facto standard to be used is just reasonable, not crazy.

If a recruiter needs an editable file of your CV, what would you expect them to ask you? Anything other than Word, in 2010, would be less convenient. Not only, like anybody - be it nerd, geek, or technophobic - a recruiter is not supposed to share your opinion on MS or Word, they are not supposed to even even know about it, because their expertise is elsewhere.

In any case, RTF will work. You may trick them by renaming it .DOC and Word will open it all the same, with or w/o some complaining, depending on the version.

That is exactly what they do here in Australia and it sh*ts me no end when I've done a nice concise two page resume, they remove my details and add their header and send it through as two pages and one line on the third page making me look like a complete MS Word noob in front of an employer.

I actually brought this up during an interview about how unprofessional it made me look and the interviewer acknowledged it and said "Even though they have removed your details, it would probably only take a small amount of time for me to look you up and find your details if you have at least some online presence or use the telephone book or electoral roll if I really wanted to"

Many recruiting firms use a piece of software that puts your resume into a database, with all the details cross-referenced and searchable.

Having the document in a well known and editable format makes it easier for their automatic parser algorithms to do this step automatically.

I'm guessing PDF would require an extra step. Or perhaps require that the company writing the database software pay a license to Adobe. Or something like that.

If there are any empeggers who are either lawyers or recruiters, then they are the exception to my next statement, but otherwise, if stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat, it's hard to say which get eaten first, the recruiters or the lawyers. That should tell you something of the way I feel about recruiters in general.

I remember an interview where somehow my resume was handed to a potential employer where all of the bullet points under my job history were jammed together into one paragraph without punctuation.

Really Neato Job

• Important Task 1
• Important Task 2
• Other Aspect of stuff I did

Became

Really Neato Job
Important Task 1 Important Task 2 Other Aspect of stuff I did

Of course, seeing that made me realize the great care the employer had gone to to find quality people for the job (they ended up offering me the job at a higher pay than I was currently making, and I turned it down because I determined they were evil).

I always take an unadulterated copy of my CV with me to interviews...

Following a spectacularly cross-purposed interview I had last year, I'm thinking of also taking an unadulterated copy of the job description I'm applying for, in case it's not what the interviewers start interviewing me about.

Peter

I thought headhunters worked for a company to find you, not work for you. Am I backwards in that?

They can do both (at least here). But they can also work for you to find you jobs. Both my wife and I have had this relationship with headhunters in the past.

Ahhh, gotcha. I've been called by headhunters because another company (competitor) wanted me, but never had one working for me to find another job.

Same. Still leaves a spectacular first impression, though.

And that's what I was doing when I was looking to the point of starting the interview by handing over a resume presented as the real one that hadn't been "adjusted"

Possible solution: embed the PDF as attached objects inside the Word document. If done properly, I'll bet the printed output looks perfect. The only downside to this approach is that it would completely break systems that try to index your vita.

I had one of those interviews, a long time ago. They started asking me all these questions that I just sat there going "ummm....", while I watched them putting big ol' x-marks all over their notepads. About half-way through, I asked them what job they were interviewing me for, because it didn't sound like what I had applied for. The one, I was qualified for, and capable of. No so much for the other. But do you think they started over? Oh, no. They just mumbled a bit about how the skills are transitory, and you'd need them for both positions (which was patently absurd), then asked one or two token questions relating to the position I had applied for. And that's how I ended up not working for Softimage (which, retrospectively, turned out to be a good thing).

I once met a very cute babe who worked at SoftImage in Montreal. 5'7", long soft curly brown hair, great smile, and.. nude, outside of the sauna at a climbers' camp.

We had a good long chat sitting together under the stars. One of the few times I wished momentarily that hadn't been married already.

Cheers

This has nothing to do with any anti-Microsoft sentiment I have. I'd have a similar argument if recruiters required me to have a WordPerfect copy of my resume. Or, for that matter, a LaTeX version, though that would cause less of a personal issue, obviously.

And my argument that Word sucks is also not prejudiced. It works fine for producing a file intended solely for print (though I seriously doubt you'll find it being used in the printing industry) but using it as a portable file format is awful. It renders the document differently depending on what version of Word you're using. Heck, if you have different fonts, the same version will render it differently.

Case in point: I recreated my whole resume as a DOC and I got back an email this afternoon from my recruiter that it had rendered wrong for her to the point of losing data. (I suspect tabs are the culprit.)


There is no reason a recruiter needs to edit my resume, and I don't even really care that much if they do.

Besides, if they need to "edit" they can annotate ad mark up a PDF and then submit it back to you for recommended changes. If they need to add something ahead of your resume they should include another cover sheet or again, annotate the top of the PDF with their own watermark perhaps. This would look far more professional for them and the people who created the original resumes.

The only people that should be getting source files (original editable documents) are people in a production/print industry involved with producing final output documents for you. No one in that industry wants to see a Word document, but that's besides the point.

Bitt, you're asking for reasonable data strategies from people who understand very little of how the machine in front of them uses/interprets that data. They have no clue. They only know how to do the things they knew how to do yesterday and the day before that.

I've watched a professional person
1) go to the start bar
2) scroll up to Windows Explorer
3) root around in their drive's directory for a document
4) see what file type it is
5) close winexplorer
6) go back to the start bar
7) scroll up to whatever program opens that file
8) open the program
9) click File
10) click Open...
11) root around in the drive's directory looking for the file they just had in front of them in winexplorer
12) open the **#&%@&$*& file!

I swear I was gonna slap him.

/rant

Assuming that a recruiter, or a plumber, or a medical doctor, necessarily knows the difference between a .doc and a .pfd file is, with all due respect, just absolutely unrealistic.


[This post is missing content - Totally Bruno's fault - read next message]

I have to put forth a BIG apology. I have a couple of new buttons here in the board UI and I accidentally edited TAYM's post while I was attempting to reply. Unfortunately I only noticed this once the forum returned me to the post view. Damn, those buttons shouldn't be so close together.

Arrrrgh! (Don't kill me Tom)

So there's a bunch of other really compelling text missing which I hope maybe taym can put back in. Sooo VERY sorry. It won't happen again.

Bruno, no harm done. I could find my post by just going "back" on the browser. Nice.

Here's my post.



Fine. I stand corrected. So your point is that it is unreasonable to expect that a recruiter asks for an editable version of your resume.
I agree it shouldn'd be like that in a perfect world, assuming a recruiter does not need to edit it. But it is nonetheless perfectly reasonable that they do in reality, because recruiters are not IT people. Most non-IT people I know, of all type and backgrouds, simply are not familiar with "editable" and "non-editable" concepts. If ie has letters on something that looks like a white page, on screen, that's all they need.

As said before, Word is by far the most popular text editor. It is simply logic that you are asked for that format, regardless of how inefficient/ineffective it technically is for the purpose (or in general, for those who like you think "it sucks").

Unless users >need< the featiures a PDF file brings (contracts, legal docs, occasionally), then they will obviously ask for what they know, not what's best: Word.


I did not say so. "Word sucks" has a precise meaning to you, just as "Words rocks" has a precise meaning to others.

My point is that this is irrelevant to most people, and rightfully so. I do not expect everybody to share my expertise, as I don'e expect anybody to assume I share their expertise. There are many things I do wrong because I can't possibly know all.
Assuming that a recruiter, or a plumber, or a medical doctor, necessarily knows the difference between a .doc and a .pfd file is, with all due respect, just absolutely unrealistic.

As technology keeps becoming more popular, I am sure that most people will undesrand as see the difference. Not today, yet.

Your argument assumes that the recruiter simply asked for a Word doc, using it as synecdoche (intentionally or not) for a formatted text document of unspecified type and doesn't really care what format it's in as long as she can read it. But this is demonstrably untrue, because I provided a PDF before she specified a format, she was able to read it, and then specifically asked for a Word doc.

No, not my point

Maybe she doesn't like using Acrobat (don't understand the interface, don't know how to search text in it, find it too slow, find the file too big, "just dislike" it).

Maybe she is afraid that .PDF may cause problems of whatever nature and sticks to what she always did, just to be on the safe side: Word.

Maybe she once lost her HDD content and her expert friend told her that Acrobat "has viruses".

Obviously I could go on forever.


I find it perfectly normal to be asked for a "Word format" of whatever electronic content is supposed to resemble a piece of paper with text on it.

Personally, my guess is that either she does want the option to edit it, whether she is supposed to or not, or she simply wants to have your CV in a format she "feels ok" with. I know a lot of people who would chose on these same two parameters.

Well, I just got some confirmation that the reasoning for wanting a Word doc is so they can edit it.

I have an interview tomorrow and the recruiter involved requested that I take printed copies of my resume. He then told me to take the one attached to the email. I never provided them with a Word doc (I don't have a copy of Word and I don't really feel like recreating it anyway), but the attachment was in that format.

It would seem that someone recreated my resume, poorly, redacted all of my personal information (except my name), and replaced it with the recruiter's information.

I happen to be very interested in this job, and the two phone interviews I've already had have gone well. That means that I'll wait until after I have an offer to yell at the recruiter instead of doing it immediately.

Why would the recruiter be trying to get in between you and the company trying to hire you? Are they worried the company will ignore them, hire you directly, and they won't get their tasty commission?

I'm guessing. I'll ask them once I have a job.

Stephen Bonner, head of security for retail at Barclays gave a very good presentation at the London B-Sides conference on how to pass the hiring challenges and a good section of his talk was around why recruitment agents equate to a man-in-the-middle attack. Their main aim is not necessarily to get you the best job; it is for them to get the most referral fees (huge generalisation, obviously, but a useful thing to remember)

The two main reasons for Word docs (given with examples of evidence which I won't copy here):

So recruiter can remove personal info so all comms go through them (so they make sure they get their fee)
So recruiter can add info so your CV is a better match to the job spec (yes, really - even adding skills you never knew you had)