Hacker News Reader

> MS Word is the only game in town, like it or not.

That's stretching it. Most companies are totally fine with PDF these days, not in the least because it is WYSIWYG for screen and print and just works. Looks a lot more professional too; especially if you are looking for a job in IT.

When recruiters or temp agencies ask for Word documents, they want this because then they can strip out all your personal data and pass the documents on to the companies (their customers) looking for employees. With PDF they need to do more work.

Well that problem might go away as the latest versions of Word open PDF files for editing by converting them to an editable World file, works pretty well the few times I have used it.

Sometimes PDFs store actual character data (like vector graphics), and sometimes they store static images. Last I checked (admittedly a few years ago), Word conversion only works on the former. It didn't do OCR or anything so dramatic.

If only some PDFs will work for them, they wouldn't accept them at all.

Can it handle the fancy ligatures[0] that LaTeX creates?

[0] http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/297426/spacing-betwee...

Not just personal data, some recruiters even add skill sets to the resume without checking with the candidate

> they want this because then they can strip out all your personal data

This is correct. Agency employees are taught to remove contact info, apply their own header, and trim the length (5 page maximum) before sending to clients.

I've seen recruiters pass along résumés in plain text format. Now it makes sense -- copy/paste from PDF.

Yeah, I tend to agree. I write my CV in LaTeX. This way I can easily add or remove things, I can source control the .tex files, and I can also produce a PDF file.

Also pdf can contain clear text. No need for ocr...

That's interesting. 100% of the resumes I have sent have been PDF. I haven't even read a request for a Word document anywhere. Which country/domain are you talking about (for me it's tech jobs and academics in Germany). I have stopped applying to anyone who asks for a real world document so maybe that's a niche I'm missing?

Honestly that's strange to me that you outright refuse. Feel like you have missed out on potentially good positions? Sorry not trying to be snarky, just curious (I personally have never applied to a place that didn't request a PDF or only requested word docs here in the US for tech jobs)

* I do feel that pdfs are far more professional

This is sort of thing that makes a good litmus test.

Places I'd actually want to work are far morely likely to accept or even require PDF.

I don't give recruiters a word-formatted CV. Too many times I've had my CV edited from what I gave them before forwarding it on. It got to the point where I had to start asking companies I interviewed at for a copy of what the recruitment agencies had sent to them.

What would they edit onto your CV?

When this has happened to me they'll stick their logo and contact details on the top

Sometimes it was just adding a cover page - that's fine.

Other time they'd edit my contact info out, change wording, stuff like that. I'm not happy with edits being made without my approval, so I stopped giving them an editable format.

I never saw anything super egregious like lying about skills - but that's not to say it never happened.

There have been stories of recruiters adding in stuff you never worked on before as well.

For example, I've had recruiters add in stuff like "2 yrs exp in PHP" when the closest I had gotten to PHP then was editing Wordpress to make it work like it should.

Sounds like 2 years of experience to me...

When much younger and a much more naive about recruiting practices, this happened to me. I went to an interview, the interviewer started asking me a bunch of Novell server question, and I got confused saying I didn't really know that. They indicated it was on my resume, I asked to see it, pointed out that it wasn't my resume (and showed a bunch of subtle formatting changes) and the interview was quickly over. I angrily called the recruiter on my way out and that was my last dealing with them.

(TEKsystems in Southfield, MI, for what it's worth. But this was also 1999-ish.)

I've since found out that it's a pretty common practice and usually the candidates play along just to get the job.

Wrong strategy, they will OCR any doc type you send them, even paper.

Better to just have an explicit conversation with the recruiter agreeing to your ethical/personal boundaries. Based on their response you'll probably get a good clue whether or not they respect that.

There are ethical recruiters but as with any group of people you have to sort out the good ones.

Steve I think the critique is a little pessimistic.

Exporting to Word would be simple change if merited, so that is really more of a feature/strategy suggestion rather than evidence the business is fundamentally not viable.

Regarding competing with LinkedIn, it hard to judge without knowing the full vision. OP said this was step 1 towards a platform. Besides LinkedIn does lots of things suboptimally, and other people have built businesses that work along side their ecosystem.

Finally other comments are correct when they say recruiters only want Word to strip your info. Couple fyis on this point:

1) Stripping contact info is not unethical. If a recruiter worked hard to find you and/or build a relationship they should not have to worry about companies using their work to cut them out of a deal.

2) Adding in skills without your knowledge is way unethical. Ask up front if they do this. Some also scrape your resume (and tons more) and submit without you knowing, then if a company is interested they call you and say XYZ company is interested in you. Most people don't complain about this part because its a free job offer, however personally I don't like and always ask what their source was.

3) Having only PDF and not Word is very unlikely to hurt you. If recruiters are interested they will just OCR into Word in about 30 seconds.

Having worked on a job application and onboarding web application, I can tell you that our customers prefer PDF or image renderings of the documents over word. Even imperfect word -> pdf conversions are tolerated to some extent if it means not having to open word.

And our customers are mostly entrenched industrial suppliers and government-owned private entities with byzantine processes, not some tech startups.

In my experience they love to use Office internally, but not for external documents.

I use that situation as a personal litmus test. If I get no response back or "I can't open this I need Word!!!!1!" I already know I don't want to work there. Why do tech at a techphobic company?

Strange. When I talk to recruiters, usually I just link my LinkedIn, and when they ask for a separate CV file, they're usually quite happy with PDF. I never heard them asking for Word format.

That's a recent development. Recruiters are finding out that you can use Office 2016 to edit PDF, too.

I can understand wanting to download an editable version of the document, but in my experience no company has ever specifically asked me for a word document, I've always sent PDFs. Microsoft was the only company that communicated via word docs (which looked like absolute garbage, by the way, since they expect you to have purchased the latest and greatest office suite complete with all of its useless features), and I still sent them a PDF resume and it turned out just fine.

I feel once editing is done, PDFs are much more professional because they open without any virus warnings, update notifications, or "this document is in read-only mode" banners.

That said, yes, when editing is NOT done a PDF is almost impossible to deal with.

I'm really surprised at this comment - I can't recall the last time I had my CV in Word format. At least over 5 or so years ago. And even then, I think it was voluntarily on my part: I don't think anyone's ever requested Word format from me.

Have you carried out any research/surveys for Resume Fodder to find out what percentage of people are encountering this?

Edit: I'm in Ireland, so maybe this is a US thing, but I've always thought we were a bit behind here in terms of trends of software usage.

I started building a Django front end for managing a JSON resume, with versioning and cut and paste. It was more for me, so I could stop fiddling with so many old copies of my CV. So I'll take a look at your project.

As for output formats, I was planning to integrate HackMyResume (http://please.hackmyresume.com/). Then using the library of existing templates would have been possible. The graphic design quality of some of those templates isn't what I'd want though... I had ideas about enabling HTML templates to support interactivity in some fashion.

But HackMyResume is Node based... and Node is annoying as I found out. I see you are using Go, so no idea what it might take to integrate Node or reuse the logic. Why can't you use the JSONresume templates available?

Then I decided to stop being a developer :) Life is ... different now. I'd recommend it if one is so inclined.

What do you do now if you don't mine me asking? I have only been a dev for 3 years now so its a little early for me to consider changing my occupation (if anything I would be likely to get a phd and/or consider teaching/research) but I'm always interested to see what people choose when they make a major life change.

I took a year off, tried to work on my writing... Way too many ideas there and there is still some writer's block thing going on. I have tried to transition into this other interest a few times, but having to pay rent is always a blocking factor. Writing code all these years has worn some groove in my mind, I fear. One good screenplay though... If Universal Basic Income existed, I'd definitely be in the arts in some capacity. Theatre, etc. I'm completely useless for anything else other than IT or creative stuff - sales, management, MBA, etc.

I was thrashing about, so I decided to go to grad school to get an official certificate aka MSc in machine learning. The statistics part is surprisingly interesting, it's technical so I'll make some money, but it's not the grind of development. I would not take a data engineering position, for example. My last job involved some work in this area and it was a breath of fresh air re: my desire to deal with computers. I wish I'd looked into it earlier. My engineering/dev background + this will hopefully make HR/recruiters think I'm a unicorn. A highly paid unicorn.

I have this book, you'd probably enjoy it:

http://www.pobronson.com/index_what_should_I_do_with_my_life...

When I receive a resume in PDF instead of Word, I count it as a plus for the candidate.

> so I wrote Resume Fodder (https://resumefodder.com) as an open source alternative.

But JSON Resume is entirely open source already: https://github.com/jsonresume

Why not simple add a Word output to the existing project? You also created a new schema, which is almost the same, but not quite.

I don't understand the purpose of re-inventing the wheel here. The other project has dozens of contributors, I'm going to assume it stays up to date more.

--- Edit: I see your product does actually integrate with theirs. Still seems like it could have all been one product, though. I don't understand what you mean by "an open source alternative."

I agree with what you say. These days I see a lot of projects which could've simply benefited both themselves and others by contributing code to the original project which they re-implemented.

I tried (wasted my time?) putting my rich resume in JSON Resume, and it didn't work for me. The development of the project is way too slow for its simplicity.

For example, you can't add projects to a job; you can't assign skills to a project or a job. For people who did consulting, this is a must, but not available. There are many other issues, but those are, for me at least, the road blocks.

> Maybe (?) that works for the super-elite echelon who don't really have to "job hunt", and who maintain a resume only as a formality. But for the other 95%+ of plebs who have to actively apply or work with recruiters... MS Word is the only game in town, like it or not.

On my last job hunt, nearly every employer and job board accepted resumes in PDF.

For the most part, the only people who wanted Word were recruiters, and I'm done doing business with them. Every single job I've ever gotten has been the result of me directly applying, and all recruiters have ever done is waste my time and spam me.

I use a mix of a semi up-to-date LaTeX CV and Github/Linkedin profile. Though I haven't switched full-time jobs in about 10 years, it's served reasonably well for securing some side work (mostly academic, but some other consulting and contracting as well).

I agree that this is still kind of an open problem, but unlikely to be a business opportunity in the making.

Shameless self plug:

I wrote https://github.com/awalGarg/cv-maker/ which generates the resume in markdown. From there, you can convert it with pandoc to basically whatever you want. It is not much polished yet, though.

Poppycock... I've not converted my resume to word format in twenty years, the last time someone asked for it. Not to mention the resume should be in a read-only format, "secure" from recruiter modification.

PDF is far and away the #1 format for resumes. #2 isn't MS Word—it's plain text. The rise of HR and applicant systems mean employers are looking for machine-readable experience and education.

Thanks that's awesome.

I love json resume but last time I couldn't even find a good way to generate pdf's just html, much less doc.

standard template doesn't seem to be working.

HackMyResume does Word, PDF, ....

http://please.hackmyresume.com/

But it is a Node app.

I think that's what I used, if I remember correctly, the pdf looked bad, and trying to capture the webpage as pdf did not improve things.

Great point! I'll keep in mind. Thank you.