I eventually gave up on Word templates and now keep my resume in LaTeX. Neat and organized - not unlike this example only with more detail and nicer fonts :)

Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.

I’m assuming you’re concerned with resume manipulation? Or is there another reason you prefer to submit your resume in a non-editable format?

Resume manipulation is actually more common than you think if you go through a 3rd party recruiter, the ones that cold call you for jobs.

They usually strip the content from it and drop it into a container resume that has their details so that they get credit from the hire I assume. lol. That being said, whatever the poster was doing to stop the resume from being edited is moot. They will just copy the content from the PDF and paste it into a new one.

Yep, I've been surprised by the contents of my resume at an interview set up by a recruiter once.

"It says on your resume you have extensive experience in X."

"I do not."

They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out and pasting their ugly letterhead over the top. Which I suppose they could still do with a PDF if they have Acrobat Pro.

They only "came across" your résumé -- similar to how San Franciscans come across turds. 99 times out of 100 they didn't even bother to read it.

> They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out

This makes some amount of sense because they want to avoid the company bypassing the recruiter and their commission. I was once hired like this (although I didn't know it until much later, when the owner told me). I think it's a realistic and reasonable fear.

I have a "redacted" version of my CV for this purpose which removes the personal information, but I can't recall I ever actually used it since I haven't really used recruiters for a decade.

I see obviously not-the-original resumes from basically every recruiter. If you tell a recruiter "we need someone with senior FOOlang experience", the next day there will be six resumes, one of which has an organic "brought in FOOlang to orchestrate object frackers, reducing development time" and five of which have "N years FOOLAND" inserted into a Skills section in a different font.

This is interesting...what do you suspect is behind this? Do recruiters just tell candidates "Hey, make sure to put FOOlang on your resume before you apply to this job."

No, I'm strongly implying that many recruiters will just change resumes with minimal regard for the truth. Note the difference between FOOlang and FOOLAND, among other things...

Woah, that is way more insidious than I was expecting. I get what you mean now, and that just seems really stupid on the recruiter's part. Doesn't it come out during the interview process if there's BS on the resume?

But I'm guessing that's your point, right? Because the hiring manager should notice, and the interview process should screen for it, so this must be a symptom of much larger scale dysfunction in the tech recruiting/hiring space.

In the best case scenario, the recruiter called up twenty prospects and said "Quick question -- have you worked with FOOLAND?"

"You mean FOOlang? Yeah, a little."

"And what jobs did you have when you did that?"

"Uh, I learned a little about FOOlang in the job I had from 2010-2012, and then it came up again in the job in 2015."

"Thanks! I think I'll have something for you tomorrow."

And then the recruiter edits "Skills" to include six years of the still-misheard FOOLAND.

Everything else is worse.

> Doesn't it come out during the interview process if there's BS on the resume?

Oh yes. As the candidate this is also great when the interviewer says something like “It says here you’ve worked with x” and you go “I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t on there when I submitted the resume (to the recruiter), let me see that” and it turns out like the OP said, extra skill added in a different font.

I just downloaded the MS annual report (don't ask why) which is in Word, naturally, and it was marked "Final" just to discourage / prevent editing.

I have no idea how hard it is to get around that, but probably too hard for most headhunters.

Sounds like you dont have a culture where docs with "2022 Budget FINAL v2 - my copy (3).xls" aren't normal :)

No, indeed I don't.

So enlighten me, since I don't use Word much: if you mark your resume "Final" and a headhunter wants to "improve" it, what do they need to do?

Unmark it? :D

In some pdf readers there is an option "respect limitations"… by disabling it you can print even when print is disallowed and so on. I guess it's the same with word documents.

I just answered my own question, since I had the MS report in Word.

I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh.

Unforunately, being able to read the document is already sufficient access to make your own copy and alter it however you please.

The best you can do is a digital signature[1], which proves that the document has not been tampered with. Of course, it's up to the recipient to ask for a signed document and to actually check if the signature is still present and accurate upon receipt. Otherwise, it's very trivial for a third-party to remove the signature and add their own edits.

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/add-or-remove-a-di...

I got that request once - I just took a screenshot of my tex rendered resume and made it full page in word.

I actually got an interview - I never followed up, but I thought maybe they had a security policy against opening PDFs or something.

Yeah, I usually move on from these recruiters.

"Can you send it to me as a Word file?"-style recruiters have always been correlated with a poor experience for me.

My experience has been that great workplaces sometimes have Whitt luck with recruiters, so you’ll end up judging a book by its cover. But one only has time to make so many applications, and you gotta filter them somehow, so why not by recruiter skill?

LaTeX seems very difficult. Why are you using it for such a basic job you could do with MS Word?

In my experience looking at résumés (mostly for entry-level tech roles), fancy formatting is 100% an attempt to cover for a lack of skill. I haven’t seen one that had good content. Intuitively, this makes sense to me, and seems to fit with the old adage, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Imo, your experience should speak for itself.

> your experience should speak for itself.

When it does, you have trouble fitting it all on 1-2 page. You quickly go to text only, and organize things accordingly. When you lack experience, you try to make things look like an infographic so as to fill space with trivial information.

Then there are the people who dazzle you with both their brilliance and the shiny stuff. They get the job over just the brilliant person...

>Imo, your experience should speak for itself.

What's wrong with saying, "May I draw your attention to my experience? They have something to say."

I would do your best to fully ignore anything like this. It's bound to be incorrect sometimes.

Oh, for sure, I read all of them top to bottom when I’m part of the hiring team. I just haven’t actually seen one that was fancy that had good content. The layout doesn’t matter to me, as long as it’s consistently formatted.

I think certain schools or career programs must tell their students to do resumes that way (with gauges and stuff) because I have encountered big clusters of them, even if on average they're rare