I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50.
The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found.
The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not because they’re common.
Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.
"It says on your resume you have extensive experience in X."
"I do not."
They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out and pasting their ugly letterhead over the top. Which I suppose they could still do with a PDF if they have Acrobat Pro.
This makes some amount of sense because they want to avoid the company bypassing the recruiter and their commission. I was once hired like this (although I didn't know it until much later, when the owner told me). I think it's a realistic and reasonable fear.
I have a "redacted" version of my CV for this purpose which removes the personal information, but I can't recall I ever actually used it since I haven't really used recruiters for a decade.
They usually strip the content from it and drop it into a container resume that has their details so that they get credit from the hire I assume. lol. That being said, whatever the poster was doing to stop the resume from being edited is moot. They will just copy the content from the PDF and paste it into a new one.
But I'm guessing that's your point, right? Because the hiring manager should notice, and the interview process should screen for it, so this must be a symptom of much larger scale dysfunction in the tech recruiting/hiring space.
"You mean FOOlang? Yeah, a little."
"And what jobs did you have when you did that?"
"Uh, I learned a little about FOOlang in the job I had from 2010-2012, and then it came up again in the job in 2015."
"Thanks! I think I'll have something for you tomorrow."
And then the recruiter edits "Skills" to include six years of the still-misheard FOOLAND.
Everything else is worse.
Oh yes. As the candidate this is also great when the interviewer says something like “It says here you’ve worked with x” and you go “I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t on there when I submitted the resume (to the recruiter), let me see that” and it turns out like the OP said, extra skill added in a different font.
I have no idea how hard it is to get around that, but probably too hard for most headhunters.
So enlighten me, since I don't use Word much: if you mark your resume "Final" and a headhunter wants to "improve" it, what do they need to do?
In some pdf readers there is an option "respect limitations"… by disabling it you can print even when print is disallowed and so on. I guess it's the same with word documents.
I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh.
The best you can do is a digital signature[1], which proves that the document has not been tampered with. Of course, it's up to the recipient to ask for a signed document and to actually check if the signature is still present and accurate upon receipt. Otherwise, it's very trivial for a third-party to remove the signature and add their own edits.
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/add-or-remove-a-di...
I actually got an interview - I never followed up, but I thought maybe they had a security policy against opening PDFs or something.
"Can you send it to me as a Word file?"-style recruiters have always been correlated with a poor experience for me.
What's wrong with saying, "May I draw your attention to my experience? They have something to say."
When it does, you have trouble fitting it all on 1-2 page. You quickly go to text only, and organize things accordingly. When you lack experience, you try to make things look like an infographic so as to fill space with trivial information.