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Thoughts on .docx resumes [updated]

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(Updated on December 17 to give .txt better acknowledgment.)

Friends don't let friends submit .docx resumes. As a hiring manager, please let me suggest .pdf instead. Especially if you're applying to a technical role.

My last two companies have used Google Docs and Confluence. There's nary a Microsoft logo in sight. My company would buy Word for me, I'm sure. But I don't want it. I don't know anyone in an engineering department who wants it.

When I review a .docx resume, I first click it in Greenhouse, our applicant tracking system. Greenhouse opens it up, but often (or maybe always?) garbles it. The last one I opened was just a bunch of empty bullet points and an empty table. No words at all.

So I download the resume and open the file. By default, macOS opens it in TextEdit. I can read it there, fortunately, but it's not a pretty sight. I'm sure it looked much fancier in Word before it was sent.

Each time I go through this, I'm left scratching my head: shouldn't an applicant for a software-engineering job -- a very technical role -- foresee this awkwardness? Shouldn't they know that a PDF is a much better format for a resume? And each time, I tell myself to forget about it and give the candidate the benefit of the doubt.

But ... right?

A PDF means that I'll see what you see -- no Microsoft products required. It also means I can't accidentally fat-finger a typo into your doc without realizing it and then assume it was you that was sloppy. (I haven't done this, I don't think. But it seems like a thing that could happen.)

Don't .docx unless you know they want .docx. Otherwise, .pdf! It's a wacky format, but it gets the job done.

Disagree? You might be right! Email me and tell me why!

Update regarding .txt files

treeshateorcs emailed me to ask (paraphrasing): What about .txt files? Aren't they even better than .pdf since you can open them virtually everywhere without special software?

That's an excellent point! As a Vim user myself, I'd certainly never knock a candidate for submitting a .txt file. I bet they open just fine in the Greenhouse web UI, and of course they can be easily read locally. In fact, .txt would likely make me more intrigued about the candidate than an over-produced .pdf.

My only concerns are edge cases that probably aren't worth worrying about:

With any easily mutable format, someone could accidentally muck it up before printing it, and then someone could mistakenly attribute the muck-up to the candidate's sloppiness. I don't think this has actually happened to a candidate I've interviewed.

Maybe a non-engineer on the hiring team is put off by the plainness. I'd hope that this would surface during the hiring team's discussions where they could be reassured that nerds love plain text and this format is totally fine. Again, I don't think this has ever been an issue near me. Most less-technical people learn quickly that we nerds have some acquired tastes. ;)

So, by all means, submit .txt. Those two issues are my only hesitations in doing so myself. But again, they're very edge-casey.

Thank you, treeshateorcs, for the great question and for making me think a little bit harder!

gemini://treeshateorcs.smol.pub