Solution: print as pdf
Print as PDF, then screenshot the opened PDF, and OCR it back into word before printing to PDF one last time.
You forgot printing it on paper and scanning it back to pdf
Unfortunately still can’t stop someone from importing the PDF into Word anyway 🫠
We don’t interact with those people
Unfortunately ceasing interaction with those people ceases the interaction of their money and your bank account 😔
I had a rule about companies I applied to. I sent them my resume as a PDF and Word 2003 document. If they still couldn’t read it, I didn’t want to work there anymore.
Would a PDF not be sufficient on it’s open to check that?
It could be worse, they could import it into excel.
“Can you explain this kerning?”
“For reasons I cannot understand, you set your system font to Copperplate Gothic.”
This is why the PDF format exists
But then recruitment companies can’t get you in to trouble by editing and embellishing your CV before sending it to the potential employer. /S (and yes this came up before)
And why everyone hates it, because when you feed it into their automated CV parser to scrape for details like your employment history and email, it doesn’t seem understand the format, or re-OCR’s the text to make errors, and out comes garbage.
Word is sadly the defacto way to get a foot in through the door
I would question the applicant’s computer literacy if they send me their CV as anything other than pdf. Basically never seen that though
Imagine you’re a firm drowning in CVs - surely you would feed everything into a PDF parser, ask an AI to summarize, and filter based on that. Good CVs can be missed this way. DocX is the safest option.
If the company is that incompetent, I’d only wanted to work there if I’m really desperate. I’d hope it never comes to this.
Might be different where you live or in your sector, but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries. The chance that the AI misses a statement that the applicant might be disabled and could sue for discrimination is too high.
Also, we have to open CVs in the browser within the hiring application, download is not allowed for data security reasons. The renderer for Word files is definitely not good enough to guarantee that the files render correctly.
Personally, we’re looking for highly skilled people in a specialized field, I’d never trust an AI summary, but we’re also not being swarmed by applicants. If the company looks for a barista, your approach might be better. But proofing computer literacy is not really necessary then anyway.
On top of that, for us presentation and the general “vibe” of the application matters (actually only the CV - the blurb on why applicant’s greatest dream would be to work at our company and similar fluff is useless anyway) If you only read an AI summary you miss out on interesting bits and potential red flags. After all we choose to invite not only based on listed skills and certs but we need to make sure that the personality fits into the existing team. And yes, combing through hundreds/thousands of applications is a shitload of manual work.
I don’t think the cover letter is always useless. It often shows, whether the applicant understood the role correctly and how their skills fit into the requirements. The motivational blabla of course is just annoying for everyone involved.
but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries.
Germany tends to be a little behind when it comes to tech, but if you submit your CV as PDF to LinkedIn via the “EasyApply” button, you can bet that there is automated filtering happening to weed down the applicants from 1000 to 10
Just gotta put 1 font size white text at the bottom with all the keywords 😇
You joke, but the top paragraph of my CV is literally that, with a disclaimer at the bottom “THE ABOVE IS ROBOT TEXT”
The way to getting through the door is by employing soft skills, ie having someone forward your CV, be it someone you knew or some recruiter you just added to LinkedIn.
There are other ways, but involve more gating like CV scrappers.
Word is sadly the defacto way to get a foot in through the door
Definitely not where I live
Something something porn delivery file
well you’re not hired because it took you six hours to format a single document. bad time management. also your document editor of choice is google docs when libreoffice and onlyoffice exist, yuck
https://rxresu.me/ (FOSS, option to self host)
You’re welcome, chat.
Or, for the Europeans in the audience: https://europass.europa.eu/en/create-europass-cv
The best-known CV format in Europe
The Europass CV is one of the best-known CV formats in Europe. (emphasis added)
Straight to lying clickbait, unbelievable. /s
Where I work you keep a txt copy of your CV to apply on different positions because the online form has you copy-paste it in a text box anyway so all the formatting is gone.
If you send your resume in word format and not pdf or even image, I did not open it at all.
Idk why I would do it in Google Docs or Word. Something like Canva is much better for a CV.
Sometimes the less-optimal tool you know beats the more-optimal tool you don’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I didn’t know Canva either before I tried it out tbh.
Fair enough!
Counterpoint: SaaS 🤢
Canva is just one of many. Make up a quick CV, download as pdf, done. I wouldn’t have used it if I had to pay for it or anything.
Ages ago (>5 years) I used a well-regarded online tool for this. I came back a few years later and they had, in the meantime, changed what was freely accessible, so I could no longer update my previously-created resume easily.
I’m sure most of the time Canva would be fine (especially for one-off usage like you’ve described). I’d still really prefer to not use SaaS for stuff like this where I want to come back later to update it in the future - I don’t want my access cut off because line didn’t go up enough, or the developer decided to call it quits or whatever X_X
