this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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me_irl
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If you provide your CV as an editable word editor document instead of a PDF then there's no way you're making it to the interview round if I'm the AI assigned to screen your application.
So many times in my early career, recruiters specified that my resume had to be in .doc rather than .pdf. One of them even said that it was so they could remove any identifying factors before sending it to their clients.
I wish I'd been canny enough to recognize that as a red flag.
edit: I've since written a script to generate a pdf resume from a yaml file. Good luck with that, recruiters!
I just use LaTeX.
Nothing wrong with that!
3rd party recruiters do this to try and lure clients (organizations that are hiring) in. They also do it to pretend you already work at the consulting firm (if the recruiter is for the consulting firm) and other shady stuff.
You are probably better off not working with someone who is editing your resume.
Higher quality 3rd party recruiters don’t do this stuff.
It’s bests to stick with pdfs
Oh, I know.
Now.
But how do I render my LaTeX to a word document?
Not sure whether this actually works, but I'd probably try pandoc first.
Print out the LaTeX
Scan the printed file back in and save as a PDF
Export the PDF to a .png
Import the .png to Word
?????
Profit
You joke, but people do that.
I've received, more than once, a screenshot embedded in an Excel file...
that script sounds hot..
I had it stored on a git VM I've long since deleted, but it wasn't complex. If you're genuinely interested, I would be happy to collaborate with you.
This is my first step of weeding out candidates. The software we used would render the PDF for a first pass, but if it had a .doc, then you'd have to download it, and open it on your machine. I tried to convince the HR department to disable .doc uploads for security risks but I guess it was a global setting and would have applied to sales hires too.
Also I'm not paying for Microsoft Windows 11 Copilot AI O365, or whatever it's currently called, just so I can send a CV.
...you think PDF files can't be edited? 🤓
Internally, PDF is such a shit format that it is more likely to cause your computer to go thermonuclear and destroy your entire neighborhood than it is to survive even the most minor edit. And that's even if you choose to pay Adobe for their craptastic editor.
It's not intended to be an editable format. Any hacky solution that allows editing it is always going to be shit.
And spreadsheets aren't supposed to be anything more than a convenient way to calculate things, but we know how that went.
Actually, it is an editable format. It can be "locked" to theoretically stop people from editing a specific file, but most of the elements available in the format are vector. Of course there are raster elements that are purely a collection of pixels, those elements are not meant to be editable.
Some apps just decide to punt rather than deal with the vectors, so they stuff a raster image into the PDF and call it "good enough".
It's obvious that Adobe's "plan" for PDF went off the rails at some point, and they just started wedging features into it all half-assed. But the real problem is that Adobe clearly decided at some point to monetize the problems in their format rather than try to fix them.
I hear the message.
Next time I refrain from making tongue-in-cheek comments or try different emojis 🫡
There was no message, I just recently had to do a deep dive into our PDF code to fix something that is ridiculous and took way too long to work around (it wasn't a bug as much as it was PDF nonsense), so I am severely butthurt about PDF right now and venting about it whenever I get the chance.
I'm sorry if my light-footed comment has caused distress by reminding you of your deep dive into your PDF code 🙏
I don't care if it's edited, it's the presentation.
PDF can be an image format. If they want to draw on top of that, they can do that with any format.