As you may have guessed by now, I am in the middle of a job search. One of the most important assets a job hunter has is their resume. The resume is your link to the employer. It tells the employer your work history, skills, personal data, and accomplishments. A good looking resume is key to keeping your foot in the door once you’ve managed to wedge it in there.
Once you have the content of your resume down, the next step is to put it into a pleasing format. This involves formating the text in a word processor. You select fonts, chose text sizes, organize things into bullet point lists, move things around to make them easy to read, do a little spell checking, and when it’s all perfect, you save the file.
But what file format should you use? My choice of format is the PDF file. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. PDF files are great for two reasons. Reason one is that you can download a free PDF reader for just about any computer platform. It doesn’t matter if you are using Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, or even RISC OS; you will be able to read the file. Reason two is that a PDF document renders the same on every computer. You don’t have to worry if your intended reader has the proper fonts or image libraries, it’s all in the PDF file already. Just about any word processor these days will allow you to export your files as PDFs.
That’s all fine in my dream world, however, reality is something different. Many employers request that you send them the resume as a MS Word document (or DOC file as most people call it). This is all well and good if you have shelled out the $150 (or more) needed to get a copy of Word, but since I have not, I am forced to find workarounds.
The best workaround by far is Openoffice.org. This free office suite allows you to create documents in DOC format. Apple’s Pages can also do this as well as a slew of other word processors. The only problem is that DOC files created by these programs don’t always look the same when you open them in Word as when you created them.
The only way to know for sure what your documents will look like is to open them in Word or in the Word Viewer. Since Word is out of the question for obvious reasons, it is down to Word Viewer (which is only available for Windows, oh the irony). So now you have to view the file and see if it works in Word Viewer and then tweak the original and view it again and again until it looks right. What a hassle.
But it’s all worth it if you get that big fancy job, right? I suppose it is if you look at it that way, but I’d rather get to the root cause of the problem. The MS Word DOC file format is not a document exchange format. That’s simple enough isn’t it?
Mostly I blame sheer technological ignorance on the part of companies world wide. Most people just assume that everyone has Word or access to it. Many people think that Word comes with the computer or that it is just part of Windows. And a fair amount of people don’t even know what Windows and Word are. They just think that Windows is the computer and that Word is that thingy that you use to type up your church newsletter (and the company’s printers, ink, paper, and staples are the publishing tools for that same newsletter). No one stops to think that their computer might be different from someone else’s computer.
So what can we do to help end this problem forever? First, find out what your company’s resume submittal policy is. Do they accept resumes in PDF or other formats? If not, talk to your HR person and find out why. Start a project to have the policy changed. Put together a presentation to educate your colleagues on the differences between proprietary and open formats. Communication is the key and that is what this post is really all about.
