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Comment by unshift | Hacker News Reader

the only piece of solid, indisputable resume advice i've heard is to never, ever send it to anybody in MS Word .doc format. only in pdf. otherwise all sorts of recruiting agencies will add and subtract things before sending it out, which typically results in the whole thing being a huge waste of time for you.

even better advice is to avoid agencies all together.

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I've been sending out resumes recently looking to move to a new position.

So far I've seen multiple companies outsource their application tracking systems. When it comes to submitting the resume the options available are either Doc Upload or Copy and paste text into a textfield.

I went to an interview and they had printed my resume from the text field. Formatting made the thing unreadable and unfortunately I don't own a printer* so I didn't have a nicely formatted copy with me.

I'm going to invest in a copy of MS Word. OpenOffice just doesn't cut it and exporting to Doc is unreliable, even reopening the same file in Oo.org. There are too many companies I'm interested in who don't take PDFs that it's becoming a problem.

Meanwhile I'm interviewing candidates for an open position at my current office and I love the people who submit PDFs.

* Didn't even remember getting rid of it. I must have thrown it out years ago. Hello paperless office.

You don't have to license your own copy just for this. I have no other interest in using Word, so when someone wants my updated résumé only in .doc format, I just pay a couple bucks to do that on one of Kinko's machines. Some libraries offer this as well.

The problem is that I need to maintain the resume in doc format. Copy and Paste from OpenOffice into Word screws up the formatting so I need to spend time correcting that, but then adding or changing information also requires I have Word. Might as well just shell out the money.

Also, FYI: OpenOffice.org exporting to Word Doc includes the revision history. Make sure to clear that if you don't want potential employers snooping your resume back in time.

Do it in Google Docs, then just paste the link in the text field. :P

This is an excellent way to get cut by the type of company that uses an external application tracking system that only accepts .docs and .txts.

I've had a LaTeX-compiled pdf resume get converted into a doc file and edited.

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