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

[Byron Jeff]

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.

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

Both will get your resume file 13ed.

> 
> I once emailed my resume as an OpenOffice file along with a link for
> OpenOffice. I didn't get that contract but the last time I spoke with
> them, they were using OpenOffice regularly.

Interesting. 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.

> 
> The classic was the perl script resume. On a Linux box it would simply
> print the ascii resume to the screen. I wanted to tinker with it and
> make it a self-executing zip file that would do other stuff (open
> browser, etc) on winders but I got tired of tinkering with it.

Now that's funny!

BAJ