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Comment by breischl | Hacker News Reader

Man, you are not joking. I still get the occasional ping from someone looking for me to work on TIBCO. I did a tiny bit of work on that in ~2001. It was on my resume for about a year. I'm still getting pinged for it 13 years later.

Ironically (or perhaps predictably) I've avoided adding the same two technologies you mentioned to my own resume.

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Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list.

I never even actually worked with Crystal Reports. A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates. The Crystal Reports variant produced a deluge of the worst-sounding jobs touted by the most clueless recruiters. And that was back when I still put my phone number on my resume, so I imagine the unlucky guy in area code 773 that got my old number is still getting calls about it.

And that is why when I got a job with a company that actually used Crystal Reports, I was very careful to not work on those portions of the code, on the off chance that some recruiter would smell some whiff of it on me, chase me down, and sit on me until I coughed up a resume in Word format.

It seems like everyone wants resumes in Word format. The one time I tried to send a PDF the recruiter nearly treated it like it was some unknown format and asked me to resend as Word.

Maybe it is just the recruiter. I saw a printed copy of my CV with their header on in one interview, so I assume they want to edit it to do that.

That's exactly why they want it as a Word document. That's what they use to produce their in-house resumes for distribution, and they don't want to waste ten seconds on opening an HTML or PDF resume in Word and selecting "Save As... Word document". They want to create their own resume, with your name on it, that is loosely based on your actual resume, so they can send it out to hiring managers.

It's very safe to say that if you don't know how to open and edit a PDF document, you have no business being a tech recruiter. Anyone foolish enough to be represented by such a person while looking for software jobs is going to have a bad time.

If what I have heard is correct, it is because some resumes scanning softwares have trouble with PDFs. They often default to asking for Word because they know it works.

I assume it's so they can modify it and re-send it out to other companies.

If you're seeing a demand for it in Word format, they're a recruiter and a lazy one at that.

Most in-house guys accept PDF. I explicitly tell recruiters that my resume is typset, so they have a choice: a PDF or a LaTeX file that nobody will ever make heads or tails out of.

If you're seeing a demand for it in Word format, they're a recruiter and a lazy one at that.

Most in-house guys accept PDF. I explicitly tell recruiters that my resume is typset, so they have a choice: a PDF or a LaTeX file that nobody will ever make heads or tails out of. I do not even know if LaTeX has a .doc plugin.

Don't do it! Shady recruiters ask this so they can edit your resume without telling you. Only send PDFs to recruiters, the shady ones won't bother with those.

> A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates.

Holy crap. A/B testing résumés? :D

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list.

And RPG/400. I took two semesters of that in college, but (thankfully) never got roped into programming in it professionally. I'm honestly not sure you could pay me enough to write RPG code, even if you were Bill Gates. Just thinking about using SEU (Source Entry Utility, IIRC) to program in that column oriented nightmare gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Somebody should create a CV with years of experience in all the worst technologies and circulate it through all the worst recruiters and see what happens.

Aha, a CV honeypot! You could harvest the names of all the recruiters that take an interest, then publish a blacklist for legitimate job seekers so they would know who not to talk to. :)

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