If your organization is such a clusterfuck that you can't figure out how to open a PDF, then I'm going to consider that a bullet dodged.
Literally every single browser can open a PDF.
Is she admitting that their organization only uses discontinued, insecure Internet Explorer to use the internet? Is she also opening word files in Microsoft word 2005?
Nah she’s talking about the ATS systems that filter through all the applicants’ resumes looking for the ones with the highest amount of matching keywords so they can get the number of applicants down to a more reasonable number to interview.
They don’t care if their bots don’t work for your PDF resume because they get so many applicants it doesn’t matter.
I’m surprised this isn’t common knowledge for jobseekers.
Fuck them for not putting the requirement on the application and wasting everyone's time though
I'm going to take a stab and say she's a recruiter for a third party staffing company.
They REQUIRE word docs so that they can copy and paste or edit your resume on their template.
Pro tip: take the requirements that they send you and Google search for it. Apply directly with the company and cut them out.
The recruiters also like to remove your name and contact details so that the companies they are selling you to can't bypass the recruiter.
Unless you open the pdf in gimp or something (and it's not just a photo, which would be equally bad in a word document) you should be able to copy from a PDF too.
Well duh...PDF stands for "portable document file", not "readable document file".
You can send it, but no one can read it.You should use readable text files (RTF) instead.
Ahhhh! I finally understand what UTF means now!
“Portable Document Format”. If they can’t open it, fuck them, you don’t want to work for that tire fire.
Learn how to do your job you lollipop.
Reminds me of that greentext about an IT guy for a big business who has absolutely no idea what he's doing and just keeps telling people over the phone to install Adobe Acrobat, about 2 or 3 times a day at most, and 98% of the time it works.
Thank you stranger for understanding my deep internet references when my wife sure doesn't lol.
Well, this is obviously ridiculous. If you want to maximise your chances, make it as easy as possible. Send an exe.
You. I like you
They want it as a word doc so they can edit it and fuck with it before passing it along.
This isn’t even necessarily for nefarious reasons. I’ve actually had a case where HR was trying to help by putting in the words that they were stupidly required to find in a resume.
Still not a good sign of a properly functioning organization.
They also like this for the off chance you forgot to disable revision history - so they can look at how you edited the document over time.
This would be a great opportunity to insert a bunch of crazy content hidden in the edit. Like passages of the Bible or edits of an erotic book you've been writing.
She doesn't know that Word can open PDFs
Can't open a PDF? Fine, here is a JPEG of my resume.
I always think of the one green text where the first thing the person does when they get resumes is to throw the top half of the pile in the bin cause:
Can't have any unlucky people working here.
If you are an HR manager and you're unable to open a PDF then you should first try and finish first grade high school before continuing your job.
How many great employees have YOU missed out on because you're so lacking in basic life skills that one wonders how you found the tit as a baby to nourish yourself...
It's because they feed the document to a parser and pdf parsers are more involved and may even require OCR. They aren't unable, they're inept and cheap
Alternative suggestion: spray paint your resume on the outside wall of the offices of whatever company you are trying to apply at. Bonus points if you manage an approximate rendition of Comic Sans throughout.
This is legitimately feasible with a 3d printed stencil
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Apparently it's because a lot of agencies use software that automatically scrapes résumés for keywords that match job descriptions and they don't work very well with PDFs.
This isn't a PEBCAK error for once, and that's very surprising because I've learned the hard way that your average recruiter is a professional spammer that will flood your inbox with shitty roles whilst lacking the mental capacity to understand that entry level doesn't mean 5+ years of experience.
This has got to be a shit post or engagement bait...
Sorry I can't see this picture, can you upload it as a word document please?
I used to do layout and design for children’s books. I cannot tell you the number of times I requested an image to be edited, or a higher resolution version, only to be sent a word doc with the image inside the document.
I used to work IT at a school and reports were emailed to parents as PDFs.
We got a complaint from a few parents saying things like, why are the reports PDF? Not everyone has Acrobat Reader, you should be sending these out as Microsoft Word files.
I then had to tell them that unlike Microsoft Word, Acrobat Reader is free to download and install. Anyone can get Acrobat reader or another PDF viewer, but not everyone just has Word on their device nor are they willing to buy it.
I didn't mention the part about a Word file is easy to just edit.
I'm also going to assume that some of them are using a work laptop where they have Word installed and no admin rights to install a PDF viewer and too lazy to ask IT.
Not just this, most (?all?) browsers now support viewing standard PDF documents… So, they shouldn’t even need to installing anything as long as they aren’t using IE…
Edge defaulting to the default pdf viewer is the bane of my existence
What the hell? Every bit of resume advice I've ever gotten has said to use PDF to protect from potential formatting errors due to display differences.
The great thing about random tech illiterate assholes posting "hot tips" like this on LinkedIn is that they very often don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
