[Ankhers]

> Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.

This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false information.

I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do that.

[dhosek]

I've had them re-type the resume and add typos and errors. I don't need a recruiter for that. I can put typos and errors on my resume by myself just fine.

[llbeansandrice]

I was doing some interviews and the resumes we were getting were like 5+ pages long. Maybe it was some cultural difference or something but I'd always been told to keep my resume to 1 page front & back at the absolute longest.

Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate them.

Fuck recruiters.

[apohn]

It's not cultural. I think the agencies are trying to put in every single keyword and "skill" to get past algorithmic filters and also make sure non-technical managers see the words they are looking for.

At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.

After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."

The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.

I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.

[brailsafe]

I'm not sure entirely that it's not cultural, though I'd love for someone to confirm. I interviewed with a recruiter for jobs in Australia, and they asked that I make my resume into a novel.

[apohn]

I wasn't trying to imply that all countries have similar expectations of resume format and length. I was just saying that if all the resumes from recruiting firms are atypically long, it's probably the recruiting firm that is responsible. It's not because they employ people on visa or anything like that.

I'm an immigrant to the US, and in my home country resumes are all really long. Even people who have never had a job and just finished their bachelors somehow find a way to have 5 page resumes. I think immigrants to the US in IT/Tech roles figure out fairly quickly that they need to drastically reduce the lengths of the resumes.

[exikyut]

Huh. How long ago was this? Genuinely curious (pessimism and cynicism in cheek, if you will) if this is a good idea for me to do if I'm applying somewhere not deeply technical (eg, FAANG).

[brailsafe]

To make you're resume a novel? In NA? Probably not a good idea. This was a decade ago

[exikyut]

Ah, thanks.

I'm actually in Australia myself. Guess my choice of reference for "nearby offices of competent tech companies" had unintended geographic connotations, woops

[mysterydip]

would digitally signing and marking as no changes possible after signing work?

[jmah]

No, because when companies receive an unsigned resume (after modification), it will look like every other unsigned resume they receive

[Tempest1981]

Some companies want resumes submitted as text or .DOC, for easier keyword searching perhaps. Or to avoid viruses? So the recruiter may OCR the PDF, then "improve" on it.

[pjmlp]

Why bother?

Apparently everyone keeps forgetting that PDFs are editable.

[chungy]

It's really not made to be and with the exception of an embedded file that's actually editable (eg: LibreOffice optionally keeping an ODT version inside the PDF), "editing" a PDF tends to be a disaster of trying to match the layout with whatever text you are attempting to edit.

Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a bit easier as most of the source text is in the document, others like LaTeX end up looking like garbage through machine processing.

[tempestn]

Although if you're just trying to add a bullet point to the end of a list that would often be fairly straightforward.

[1-more]

Does the PDF contain the whole font in such a way that anyone can add text in that font? I ask because I use uw-garamond from the Mathdesign package.

[mcdevilkiller]

It can. You decide if the font should be embedded or not.