I normally send my CV to people in PDF format. But yesterday I got an 
email saying

   "Hi, I'm having trouble reading your CV. Could you send it to me 
again in Word format?"

I have to wonder at the person who doesn't have the free, cross-platform 
Acrobat Reader software [or Ghost View, or one of the bazillion other 
open-source PDF viewer programs], but /does/ have the extremely 
expensive Microsoft Word software which only runs on the extremely 
expensive Microsoft Windows platform.

(Technically, they could be using Open Office, Libre Office or one of 
several other packages which understand MS Word documents - but then 
wouldn't they ask for ODF format or something?)

Now, I have seen a few recruiters claim that their system "can't accept" 
documents that aren't in MS Word format. Which seems reasonable enough; 
PDF contains enough information to render an image to paper, but doesn't 
contain any logical formatting formation. (E.g., you can't easily 
determine what's part of the document body and what's a page number. But 
in a Word document, this is trivial.) A Word document contains 
information about the logical structure of the information, which gives 
software a hope in hell of pulling something useful out of the text. 
Even so, I have to wonder what they're using this software to 
automate... It's, like, 2 pages of text! How hard can it be to process 
that by hand?

Post a reply to this message