[heydonovan]

When job hunting, I'll skip those companies that require me to type out my resume. That's why I wrote the resume in the first place. Similar feelings towards those that want it in Microsoft Word format. Companies have their own filtering mechanisms, and so do I.

[Froedlich]

Hiring in my area, before I retired: (and before everything went online)

They ask for a resume and tell you when to be there.

You show up at the appointed time with the resume. After waiting half an hour. a secretary hands you a generic Office Depot tear-off employment application.

After another forty-five minutes to an hour, you get to see whoever's in charge of hiring. They're looking at the Office Depot sheet, and about half the time they don't even have your resume, which was probably round-filed by the secretary.

The hiring person isn't sure what job you're applying for, so they leave the office to consult with someone else. Twenty minutes later they return and either tell you they're not hiring, or they'll call you next week. (they don't)

My usual response was to send them an invoice for two hours of office workflow consulting at my entirely reasonable rate. None of them ever paid up, of course, but they stole two hours of my time.

[alx__]

Requiring a MS Word format means they're using ATS software. Which parses it and pass/rejects it based on predefined phrases they're looking for. Kinda garbage system.

To me that means their hiring process is extremely formal and not worth my time.

[klyrs]

My resume is written in latex; I'd just paste the source into the box...

[antisthenes]

> Similar feelings towards those that want it in Microsoft Word format.

What's wrong with .docx format? You can create it using open source office software. In my experience most forms are smart enough to parse .docx just as well as the obsolete .doc.

Besides, what other formats do you want them to accept? PDF, sure, TXT, sure. It seems silly to avoid word documents.

[jstx1]

Word documents are most often required by 3rd party recruiters who want a convenient way to edit your CV before sharing it with an employer. It's not that common but it happens. That's why it's best to use pdf instead. If they insist on a word document, you can just refuse to work with them.

[Beltalowda]

In my experience a lot of time what they want is to redact personal information so they can send your CV to employers without the employers trying to "e-stalk" you and hire you outside of the recruiter (and thus not pay the recruiting fee). I actually got hired like this once (although I didn't know it at the time; the owner mentioned a year after I worked there).

I write my CV in HTML, as that's just the easiest way to get my CV to look exactly how I want it, and then "print" it to a PDF in Firefox. I also have a little JavaScript to redact personal information if I add "#redact" to the URL, and send a PDF of that too to recruiters after I noticed that a recruiter had completely massacred my pixel-perfect CV that I obsessed over by copy/pasting it in some ugly crooked layout and sent that horrible thing to companies :-/

All of that said, I haven't used recruiters for many years, but back then my "redacted" PDF solved the issues for me.

[anitil]

They'll also strip your contact details so that the company can't reach out to you directly.

Any recruiter who trusts their clients so little is probably not worth your time, however

[derekp7]

Pasting a picture of each page from a PDF in the Word doc works too, to keep them from editing it. Not sure if there is a way to hide the keywords in it (paste it in white/on/white text, 1-pt font, and have the picture overlay the text?)

[jstx1]

Picture in a word doc sounds like the worst of everything - looks unprofessional to a human and it doesn't work with automated CV parsers.

[boring_twenties]

My resume is in plain text. I am willing to rename it to have a .docx extension and hope for the best. If that's not good enough, I guess I'm not a fit.

[david_allison]

.tex to .doc(x) will typically lose formatting and require rewriting the resume.

[netizen-936824]

Same here, if I have to retype my CV in your obnoxious web form, its just not worth the effort and I look elsewhere