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Comment by hadoukenio | Hacker News Reader

"Hi. Thanks for applying. Sorry I can't seem to open your CV. Could you please resend it to me in MS Word?"

Almost everyone except for shitty recruiters take it in PDF. And that's because the recruiters want to fix things and add their own letter-head to it. Don't do that.

In Europe 90% of all companies and recruiters will demand a .doc file. You either accept this and do your CV in Gdoc or remain unemployed. Your choice.

You sure about that? PDFs were never a problem for me, to the point of being explicitly encouraged.

Europe is not on homogenous region.

When applying for jobs in Sweden I have not had any problems using a PDF.

Well I'm Swedish and have also worked in Ireland and the UK, and have had more or less the same experience everywhere.

As a general rule of thumb can we all just agree that 90% of all human organizations -- at the very least -- are mediocre? A good resume should be part of escaping these types of places and living a more successful happy life! :-)

Qualcomm takes .doc, .docx, and .txt only. ARM and National Instruments are the same, though they also take .rtf. It depends on what software the company uses; ARM and NI use the same software, so I presume any other company that uses it has the same restrictions.

When I interviewed at my current employer, I had sent them a PDF of my TeX resume, but the monstrosity they were carrying around looked as if they'd OCR'd the PDF and copy/pasted that into Word. The only line breaks that survived were between the major headings.

Lesson: always bring lots of copies of your resume to the interview: I thought ten was sufficient, and I was almost wrong. Also: the tech skill of HR has nothing to do with the tech skill of engineers in a medium-to-large business.

That is funny. I once had someone tell me that. I told them I didn't want to work for a software company that couldn't figure out how to open a PDF document. They called me for an interview anyway, which I declined. It seemed like a really bad sign to me.

I feel like the whole job search dance is about finding the right fit, not just doing whatever it takes to shoehorn oneself through the door. MS Word only is a huge red flag. I feel like it sends a strong message as to what the culture is like at the company. On the other hand, troff only and I would be curious. I'd at least want to look at the people who made that request.

"You couldn't open PDF file?"

PDF is a filter to keep away all the clueless employers (or the ones that let HR go too far).

I have learned the hard way that clueless employers should be avoided.

I've heard that some contingency-fee outside recruiters want resumes in an editable MS Word document: They want to shop the resume around, sans the candidate's name, to potential employers. Don't know how true that is.

Who would want to work at a company that can't open a PDF file?

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