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Comment by lwigo | Hacker News Reader

Recruiters will straight up ask for .DOC versions, too. The gall.

It's common practice for recruiters to replace your personal contact info with their agency's header/contact info. I don't mind that. It makes sense.

I generate my resume as a PDF from HTML/CSS. It's fun to see how recruiters handle that. I think most use image manipulation to insert their header. One recruiter sent me some image assets and let me add the header/footer myself.

I'm sure some recruiters go too far with the .doc, but there are legitimate reasons too.

Last time I applied for job through a headhunter (2010), they ran my LaTeX resume through an automated .doc converter that destroyed all the formatting and then didn't even attempt to fix any of it. Somehow I still managed to get some interviews, and when I saw the printout on the interviewer's desk I shrieked in horror and handed him one the original paper copies that I'd luckily had the foresight to bring with me.

What are these recruiters you all talk about? Are these some middlemen you contract to get you a job? Like an athlete's/actor's agent?

I only had experience with recruiters who work for the organisation I'm interviewing for. None of this contact info / skills tampering makes sense in that context.

Post your resume on one of the really big job boards like Dice or Indeed and you'll see what we're talking about. Last time I did that I was getting 4 or 5 calls a day. Most of those recruiters were from the same three companies and you could safely rule them out because they would ask for your SSN. But anyone who calls you and tries to establish a personal relationship might be worth working with.

> I only had experience with recruiters who work for the organisation I'm interviewing for.

Where the hell are these recruiters at? I’ve retreated most of my information back because all I ever got was spam from the former.

Rather than wait for applications, some companies will hire third party recruiters to find candidates to apply. Some will have in-house recruiters doing the same. If they find a successful candidate, they're paid with commission. Sometimes, being contacted by one is the only way to apply.

I've worked with several recruiters who are trying to shop around as an outsourced recruiter. Basically, they take your resume and slap their name on it in an effort to show companies "You should use me because I provide well-qualified talent."

If you're not going through internal recruitment then this is a great way to go about it. The recruiter isn't just trying to get their 20%, so they spend a lot more time getting to know you and also getting to know where you're going.

The biggest down side is that you'll never hear a negative word about anything, so you gotta be good at asking some pointed questions.

Never send doc. Always pdf. Next time I'm lookin I'm gonna send a jpeg for shits n giggles.

Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".

At least do a png. JPEG compression is murder to text.

This may be a benefit in this case, as sneaky edits to a JPEG full of text will show up as a difference in patterns of artifacts - original text will be compressed twice, while the edits just once (or once and zero if they save the edited image to PNG). Takes a bit of time and skill to make this unnoticeable.

Ok fine I'll add a watermark too.

I'll also take a copy along with me just in case.

Ages ago, I was looking for a job. I made my CV using LaTeX, and provided it as a PDF to the recruiters. They straight turned around and asked for a Word format version instead. So I converted each page into an image, and pasted each one into a page each in a Word document, then sent that to them. They complained that there was something wrong with the document, and they were having trouble editing it.

I later had a job interview, and saw what the potential employer had been sent. They had re-typed it, and it looked awful.

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