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Comment by bennyg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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! :-)

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