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.
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
It's more of an issue with the HR platforms not being able to read PDF's. It doesn't help opening a PDF outside of the platform you are using for hiring actions
You can open pdf files. PDF files were designed to be interchangeable, and readable in the same way everywhere, it's the entire point of the format. If some shit platform cannot open a PDF file, then you need a new platform, period. It's a basic ingredients, it's like leaving out potatoes in mashed potatoes. You can still open up the file outside the platform and if said platform doesn't allow that then by god are you on the wrong wrong platform.
I have reviewed many resumes, I HATE Athenones that are sent in with word, it's always a hassle to open, it always looks different on different versions, it requires me to have to deal with Microsoft shit which I don't want, use PDF.
Elementary school*
All you do is double CLICK the fucking FILE. Your web browser will open it for you.
But the web browser won't feed a stack of a thousand into a system that ranks them based on key words.
This has got to be a shit post or engagement bait...
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.
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.
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.
That, and also to ensure they can open the document. I don't use word processors in my daily job, yet I do interviews, so if someone gives me a Word Document or similar, I'm going to be put out to read it. PDFs, on the other hand, render just fine in my web browser.
I've experienced formatting issues on different installs of Microsoft Word that both are M365, so its not even like we're throwing Office 2007 into the mix to get weird extra pages or other formatting problems
how many opportunities have you missed
Maybe they should be asking themselves the same questions if they are just ignoring most of the candidates because they are too lazy to get a pdf reader. I'm sure they aren't getting the best people with that approach.
The problem is they expect everyone to jump through hoops for them as if all the candidates are the same and they just need to pick one.
You don't even need a dedicated PDF reader, many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in. You need extra software to see word processor documents, you don't to see a PDF.
If a company is so incompetent that a PDF isn't sufficient (or even preferred), that's not a company I want to deal with anyway.
many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in
All 3 of them do. You have to work at it to find one that doesn't support reading PDFs, unless you happen to still be using Internet Explorer in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Four
The problem is they expect everyone to jump through hoops for them as if all the candidates are the same and they just need to pick one.
Had a job posting asking candidates to go on a goosehunt to find pictures of a landmark at some coordinates they provided, under the guise of "this proves you have attention to detail"... sod off.
And I don't know why some posting still require CVs... like they don't realize ChatGPT exists to write the fluff that they aren't going to read.
Seriously, job opportunities have almost always been a numbers game, there's an opportunity cost to investing time in these games that could be better spent applying to more jobs.
Actually, I do read the fluff. Not HR though, just the technical approver whether the candidate's skillset looks up to the task.
Had one candidate whose letter claimed their experience in one field would be valuable for their work with us. Indeed, they did have plenty of experience in it. If that was the field I was working in, I'd have considered them a great fit.
Unfortunately, we're a different field. Not that it would disqualify them - I'm the last person to hold a lazy copy-paste-fill template against anyone. I hate those things too. I just found that slip-up amusing.
(And I also wouldn't hold a will to switch tracks against them either. I didn't even know anything about my field four years ago, but now I love it.)
Translation: i can't insert a pdf into whatever bullshit system i'm using to thoughtlessly eliminate people
Sorry. I don't want to work for a company that's this technologically illiterate. You can't open a pdf? Are you also clicking regularly on phishing emails? What are the chances your personal data like SSN or banking information would be kept secure? What else don't they know how to do on a computer?
They are definitely feeding the resumes into some piece of software to eliminate people and it likely doesn’t take PDF. So they have to actually do their job and read something. Can’t have that…
I basically read this as “Please make my job easier by doing X”.
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
I feel like someone should link this person to this thread. Her profile is very easy to find on LinkedIn. I'm sure she'd be shocked by what people are saying, but maybe that's what she needs.
I definitely don't take advice from someone who leads with this
I am the human embodiment of a perfectly poured shot of espresso. Smooth. Satisfying. Energizing.
This is why I am able to exceed expectations and tap into superhuman qualities that transform the lives and careers of job seekers throughout the known galaxy. How?
Actual psychopath
Cool, everyone who has submitted their resume in only PDF format dodged a bullet.
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
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
Most of the time, sentences in a sensible order, we reading easier can make.
Candidate hot tip - if you're going to learn English from a fictional green puppet, choose Kermit The Frog; he is a native English speaker.
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.
I have great experience with third party recruiters. I only ever had to send them a CV (as PDF!) and they took care of the rest. I just had to go to the interview. The company hired and payed for the recruiter so for me it’s a win.
Granted, in my last two job searches I never looked for open positions myself, I answered messages from recruiters in my inbox. So it’s more that they were applying to me. Most messages can be ignored because the recruiters have no idea what they are talking about.
Exactly, so she is lying. It’s not that they can’t open it, it’s that they prefer word.
Not that you can’t copy out text from a digitally created pdf. Still, I only ever send my CV in a locked format, would never send an editable doc
Are you fucking kidding me?
That's some of the stupidest shit I've ever heard... Hell, that would even be fucking stupid in 1998.
She’s lying, many recruiters want to edit your CV in word, e.g. removing contact data, so that the companies can only contact you through them.
Shitty and unprofessional practice, no self-respecting candidate would ever hand out their CV in an editable format
Send it locked 😅
Definitive red flag if that is their supposed understanding of computers
Update: ffs I'm not defending hr, they're usually incompetent buffoons. But they're the incompetent buffoons you need to get past if you want to get hired. And I don't know about you, but when Frito Pendejo said "I like money" I kinda agreed with him. Anyway back to my OC:
Why? They're HR and hiring managers, not IT specialists.
Try seeing it from HR's perspective. They post a job and get +200 applications. The success criteria is not hiring the best candidate, it's hiring a suitable candidate. Given that premise, why would you read through all 200 applications, when there's someone with a nice website and cool sounding software, who promise that their product can sort through the resumes and only pick the relevant ones for you?
Heck, I'm definitely going to be looking for an ATS testing site for my CV now. It really doesn't matter what we think of it. If you want to communicate you'll have to do it in a way that your recipient will understand, and if my recipient is a PoS software that can't read PDFs, then writing my CV in latex is probably not the most effective way to communicate.
"we can't afford ATS software that can read PDFs"
okay, can you afford to pay me a proper wage??
If you can't open 90% of pdfs sent from different sources then you're the problem
I don’t want to work somewhere if they can’t even open a PDF. The fuck kind of Windows 3.1 machines are they using.
Even that wouldn't be an excuse: https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/3x
I also wonder what the fuck they're even looking at the site with. Any modern version of Windows can open PDF's without needing to install additional software. If they're using Mac's I'm not sure, but given that Office similarly would need to be installed to open a Word doc I'm pretty sure they could also install a PDF reader at that point ..
Mac also opens PDFs natively
These people just want to remove your contact data so they can make money off your back.
Real recruiters find candidates and setup a meeting between you and the company. They also don't care about eventually sending your contact details as their services are actually worth giving them money.
Stupid recruiters that post on LinkedIn arguing about your resume like in the OP just edit your details out and send companies a handful of resumes. They make money from simply being a glorified proxy.
"Chief Candidate Whisperer", like what the actual fuck.
I've been in hiring discussions where word doc is looked down on since the candidate is not thinking about how to protect their data from manipulation.
This ladies take is dumb as hell, or as others have mentioned because her company changes applicants information.
The number of times I got a word doc with the job description in it is ridiculous as well. Yes, I am judging you if you do that.
A PDF is also editable, sure, but at least everyone can open the goddamn thing without any problems.
Then stop using automated software that excludes candidates if the entirety of the job description isn't embedded in the resume. You're not special. You're just another job. And 90%+ of companies use dumb filtering so people have to adapt or get used to 2k+ applications per interview.
Realistically what's the worst that company is gonna do? Make my resume better?
I think they meant that the document can look significantly different based on the software reading it? Whereas a published PDF is going to look basically the same (embedded fonts, etc)
PDFs are also editable...
This lady's* take is dumb
“Portable Document Format”. If they can’t open it, fuck them, you don’t want to work for that tire fire.
She doesn't know that Word can open PDFs
Alternative explanation for why your resume was not read: https://lemmy.world/post/20282317
Unironically recommended a friend as referral to my job. He was the only person applying, but the company has a policy of needing at least two candidates under consideration for any position.
So they called back another guy who had already been rejected, claimed he was in another round of interviews, used those interviews as the comparison, rejected him as unqualified, and then hired my friend.
Pure nonsense.
Yeah, I've worked for companies who's policy says there must be three people interviewed when almost every hire is an internal promotion.
I've got no fucking clue what I just read. This job market is a joke
9/10 applicants who submit their resume as a PDF for our openings, we can't view.
Can't, or won't?
If you can't figure out how to open a PDF, I really don't want to work for you.
Or don’t know how to.
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.
They want it as a word doc so they can edit it and fuck with it before passing it along.
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 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.
Staffing agencies will do this to make you look more appealing to a client.
They should just learn to edit the pdfs if they're sent with actual text.
Or to throw it in whatever AI bullshit software they use that doesn't support PDF
If a headhunter wants to put forth my resume as if I already contract with them, then they can start paying me.
Lms "we are incompetent"
Actually this is good advice. Nowadays nobody reads your CV in the first step. Your CV first gets through an automated system (ATS i think its called). It's designed to filter out as much as possible.
The problem with PDF is that it's terrible to parse cuz it's designed for humans reading it, not machines. The only reliable way to parse it is by converting it to images and then OCR, which is kinda expensive.
So before you send a PDF, you should first try to convert it to txt and see if the content make enough sense. Or just use word to make a CV then export to PDF.
When i was looking for a job, i remember there was a website that would give you tips on your CV and they had an ATS report of your CV. I was so shocked to realize that ATS totally messed up completely to parse the correct info from my latex CV. Like I have a lot of AI/ML experience and it completely missed it and thought i had quality assurance one. And i was applying for AI jobs, no wonder I couldn't get any interviews. Then I changed it to word and an exported pdf where word wasn't accepted. I got many more interviews after that.
You can extract text from PDFs without using OCR, they aren't all images embedded in a file.
I'm sure you've opened PDF documents before and selected text in it, or searched for something. That works because the text is embedded in the document, I'm sure.
You can also create PDF documents with the text converted as images, but those are usually larger in size.
Not necessarily, CVs have complicated formatting. Nobody (should) write blocks of text, and you don't know how many columns the candidate is using. Is the candidate using a specific section to show star based skill rating or word based? So you can still search for individual keywords but if you try copying the whole pdf and paste it in txt (which is what will be forwarded to ATS), it does not make much sense. The structure is too complicated extract where you studied, what did you studied and your grade, what other experiences you have and how long you worked there etc.
Extracting structured data is in its own right a different field of science. There is plenty of recent research on extracting structured data from academic pdfs (I was working on this in a research institute in germany around 2022), even when LLMs are used it can get really complicated to the point that there are specialized LLMs for just that.
But ATS systems are cheap/not high enough priority to even use OCR let alone LLMs so unfortunately the responsibility of making an easily parsable CV comes down to the candidate.
Try this next time you see your CV, copy its text to a txt then think about if you can write a program that can reliably extract your experience, education, interests etc. Its going to be super difficult and even then it won't generalize to thousands of other CVs.
For my most recent application I submitted an Europass resume. It embeds an xml with the pdf, making it machine readable.
Whether or not the ATS can read it, I don't know.
Was it that the PDF produced by latex was less OCR friendly than the word one, or just that you didn't submit the PDF at all most of the time?
I guess if you trained a program to OCR PDFs that are produced by word it might get really good at that and less good at PDFs from other sources.
I'm curious if your CV font was computer modern?
I think OCRs are really good nowadays but i think old ATS systems don't use them or at least use old OCR. If you parse a pdf (without OCR) a word exported pdf preserve the text order much better than a latex ones.
Like i actually tried some websites and python libraries to extract the text from my latex pdf, none of them gave good results like words inside pdf would be out of order.
If i use ocr then I get good coherent text. Which is really important for ATS but I doubt people use OCRs cuz they are kinda expensive or maybe people just use old ATS systems etc
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
I should have added this was back in 2010 or so, I don't think it was as common to be able to open PDFs in browsers without an addon.
I remember sometime after 2014 I was just able to open PDFs without any additional software.
I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed Acrobat Reader to view a PDF.
I wish I had 0th finger…
.txt file it is
.txt file
80 characters wide
With cool ASCII art, like those pirated software readme files. (Looking at you, Razor 1911)
Fuck it if they can't compile my LaTeX then they don't deserve me.
This is SovCit level.
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.
Can't open a PDF? Fine, here is a JPEG of my resume.
I have been known to put high quality renders of my PDFs in word documents (image per page) to beat the file type validations.
chief candidate whisperer
are they looking to hire a horse?
I actually was going along with this for 2 split seconds.
"Wait. WAIT! Is she serious?!"
looks like that company seriously suffers a huge lack of experts, maybe if you didnt get an answer, just resend your application as a word document with your salary expectation just "tripled" for ... compensation purposes. whatever company still "depends" on microsoft still has heaps extra money it can easily divert to you without any real loss, so don't waste that chance!
Wait, they freely admit that they are incapable of opening 90% of applicants documentation?
She is trolling applicants as hard as she can
“Most of the time, we meaning” reads like the most awkward attempt at using Aftican-American Vernacular ever.
Pdf files are a prime vector for malware. One of the most reliable ways to get a virus in a system seems to be sending a gimmicked pdf and social engineer it so it's opened.
I've always kinda wondered how recruiters computers aren't swimming in malware.
I've always kinda wondered how recruiters computers aren't swimming in malware.
That's the fun part; they are!
I wonder if it would work to upload resume.pdf.exe to an ATS, and fill out the form with enough BS exaggeration to be sure that person will see it.
