[ale] Resume formatting (was: Anyone looking for a new gig?)

[Robert Reese~]

> On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 05:03:12PM -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 16:48 -0400, George L. Allen wrote:
>>
>>> (My $0.02 'technical repremand:) Last time I was job hunting -
>>> I would have loved to have found one recruiter/employer/someone
>>> who would bother to read a PDF/ASCII/html/XML/LaTeX resume
>>> instead of demanding one in MS Word format.
>>>
>>>
>> Several years ago I hit the same frustrating wall. A recruiter
>> was wanting a format I didn't have (duh - msword) so he could
>> remove my identification header to prevent the company from doing
>> an end-run around him. It had never occurred to him to take my
>> PDF, print it, cover the header with his banner and _then_ fax it
>> over. I have found that most recruiters require MSword because
>> they will edit it for the same reason.
>>
>
> True. But the bottom line requires following the requested format.
> There are two reasons:
>
> 1) No recruiter is going to take the time to do what you suggested
> when they have a virtual stack of 600 resumes for the position on
> their desk.

Any recruiter that has that many resumes for the same position is both wasting MY time and doesn't know how to properly cull beforehand.  They're casting too wide a net.  How often has someone contacted you with a nearly or completely irrelevant job?  I've had too many to count; in fact I have gone so far as to give them a Bad Day over the phone because they didn't get the message the first half-dozen tries.


> 2) It shows the recruiter that you are not willing to follow
> directions.

Then the recruiter is an idiot if he or she thinks that not having an expensive, non-standard, proprietary software is indicative of an unwillingness to follow directions.  Nor, I might add, does anyone have a right to change my information, either by addition, removal, or alteration without my express permission and approval.


> Both will get your resume file 13ed.

And reason enough to go for the end-run around the recruiter (who risks possibly getting sued for not forwarding your qualifying resume to the client).


> But why not simply export the resume in Word format?
> OO.o is the reason I don't worry about MS Office formatted
> documents anymore. It works seamlessly for the most part.

Unfortunately, when exporting to Word, OOo doesn't have the ability to password-protect the document to prevent it from being altered.  To compensate, I'm thinking the route to go is to play dumb and send the resume as a bitmap image inside the Word doc with an alter-resistant background.  My guess is at that point the recruiter has a few choices: ask you to make the changes and resubmit it, OCR it and change it him or herself, round-file it, alter it without regard as to whether the employer is going to notice, or send it in as-is.

Cheers,
Robert~