This is funny, because my assumption has always been that if I don't send a .doc the HR people will ignore it and it wont get to anyone that I want to see it.

It's a wonder anyone manages to hire anyone.

I've been told this straight up. A lot of job postings flat out say they will only take .doc, .docx, or .pdf files, and every career adviser or so called hiring guru swears by those file types. Even the ones who claim to hire for technical positions.

It's a delicate balancing act, producing something that an HR drone will understand without appearing to be technically incompetent. Like giving a presentation to a college professor and a group of preschoolers simultaneously.

What If I send you a link to a Resume page? or I just send all these formats in 1 email and let you choose. Or a bunch of links to a file generator page that spits out the resume format you have chosen.

I think the best would be not only 0day your machine, open default text editor with a text resume, full-screened (if in a GUI environment) otherwise, tmuxed or screened to your default editor.

I did try (admittedly for a non-tech temp job) including a link to the page on my site where all 6 or 7 formats of my CV were listed. They replied "Please attach your CV in Word format" (which probably took them longer than just following the link and downloading the .doc version).

I'd be sorely tempted to ask them at that point whether they have a legal copy of a Microsoft OS which includes Office that I could borrow. It'd be simple, they could just FTP the .iso to my server and...

On my first job they explicitly said on the acceptation mail something like "Please send us your resumé in Word 2003 format".

They're a sort of OK company, but there I had to go hastily copying stuff from my Latex resumé into my Word 2003 resumé and formatting it so it would look good D:

How about JSON?!

and minified? lol

I laughed for most of these - but what's the deal with the hate for HTML? Seems like a totally reasonable format for an attachment. (See https://thoughtstreams.io/g... for a possible explanation as to why I'm confused.)

I don't hate HTML! But I'm going to wonder why you're emailing me a lump of single-file HTML instead of just showing me your website. (I suppose we're "supposed" to send every company a custom-written résumé; I'd rather just see a portfolio of cool things you've done and poke at the ones that catch my interest. Again, not in HR...)

One reason to attach things might be that a candidate has worked on projects that are not confidential, but are also sensitive enough that I don't want to publish them publicly. Not everything is an open-source love-fest ;-). Another is that an email getting through is more or less an atomic operation, and there's no reason to introduce additional failure modes. Perhaps a candidate is applying for a job in a foreign country which may introduce routing issues to thei place they usually host their content (you can't send your Twitter page to an employer in China!), or they don't have a cloud server of their own, or they're a coder in some discipline other than webby junk (like graphics programming, or scientific computing) and aren't super facile with setting up reliable servers.

Email is not as reliable as you make it out to be; I recently tried to send a dozen PDFs to someone at a bank, only to find out that they never made it through. Binary searching revealed that a single one of them must have been quietly tripping a spam or virus filter somewhere and discarding the entire email. I seriously doubt HTML attachments sent to company email systems will be more reliable than github.io :)

But yes, certainly, there are exceptions where this would make sense, and I hope I'd be aware enough of them not to get all grouchy ;)

Even as I was writing it, I was thinking of some of these ridiculous overzealous malware filters, size filters, rewriting MIME-stripping proxies, and so on. Their existence bothers me :-). But if you stick to JavaScript-less HTML, you can generally get most things past them.

This is a wonderful thing. Thanks for posting.

wget http://daly.axiom-developer...

When do I start?

This is pretty funny! In seriousness, though: Used correctly, Word is highly productive. Especially when documenting your own work to be used by, you know, /real/ humans. If you /actually/ discriminate against someone who uses a tool that gets the job done effectively, well, I probably wouldn't want to work there anyway :-)

No, no. You aren't sending me your résumé so I can collaborate on it with you; you're sending it to me (a complete stranger, with an unknown setup) so I can read it! And to read it (correctly...), now I'm obliged to acquire and install both your personal choice of word processor and an operating system that can run it. No, thanks.

Sending me a Word document (a nigh-opaque blob) actually demonstrates that you *can't* use a tool that gets the job done effectively; you have a single thing in your arsenal, and you know how to sling it around and hope for the best. That's not the kind of programmer I'd want to hire.

But like I said, I just grade the code. :)

Just because someone uses a specific tool to achieve something it doesn't mean that he's in a wrong path. If you know and understand everything around you, you basically know nothing. Be specific in something does not mean you are bad. (but not interested in other solutions, other technologies can be bad)

Using inappropiate heuristics won't help you in this case. If you want your CV to reach a "complete stranger with an unknown setup", just use / export to PDF (which is the de facto standard for CVs).

I do not think that TEX is the one which a complete stranger with an unknown setup will surely open anyway. (but maybe you can find somehow a HR with a TEX opening ability. :) )

I don't disagree.

I also don't care if you're comfortable with Word and use it to write things. But just sending me the native format of your pet word processor instead of a format designed for reading, taking for granted that I'll have your word processor lying around, tells me some things about your assumptions that your résumé will not.

Sending TEX, on the other hand, is almost certainly a conscious and... interesting decision. ;)

That's correct.

This begs the question of how you'd react if someone sent you an animated GIF that displays their resume.

What about just LinkedIn URL? I don't know why HRs still ask my resume even they've contacted me through LinkedIn already.

I always write my docs in LaTeX (well, XeTeX nowadays. It's better). It blows those crappy office documents away. I'm not a math buff, but I am so used to just pumping out in *TeX, it's second nature.

I can see why you don't screen resumes. :) Don't forget that for many jobs, HR will tell applicants what format they'd like. So it's not their fault if they follow instructions and send you a .doc or .pdf.

I'm pretty sure we don't specify a format. I did once apply to the company I work for, after all :)

I keep my resume in Markdown, but I almost never distribute it in Markdown because HR departments don't really work well with plain text. I just print the resulting webpage as PDF. It feels like a hack but it works surprisingly well. This way I can also easily distribute a link to the real html on my website.

For what it's worth, I always try sending an URL to my resume first, but sometimes HR will refuse to pass it along to anyone else until I give them an actual attachment.

http://ciar.org/ttk/resume....

Also, shouldn't a Markdown-formatted file have an .md suffix? If you're going to lump it in with "text files" in general, you should do the same for html :-)

Actually, I prefer sending markdown as txt as well. In windows there is no default application for opening md files. I really enjoy the idea of HR desperately looking for a way to open it. However I know they would never try to look it up. But as for resume I still prefer pdf.

No pptx on your list?

It turns out that's the way to get people in the management stack to read stuff in my shop. Sadly.

Great read.

But can anyone tell me what does the last one mean "anything that 0-days my machine"?

0-day ist an unknown exploit. So "0-day my machine" means exploiting the machine with your CV to usually run attached code on it. So in short "hacks me using a CV".

Got it. Thanks.

...So judging by the 'pdf via TeX' line, if this guy[1] sent you a resume would your response amount to "TAKE ME NOW" ?

[1] http://www.99-bottles-of-be...

What if a candidate despises resumes and all other forms of self deception and they send only awesome code to look at? It might not make it past the HR screen or an external recruiter but heck this candidate doesn't really need a new job.

...whelp, thanks for the checklist of formats to keep my resume in. I wonder how badly some of the automated sucker systems will break on these? XD Surprised ya' dislike PS though, I generally find any I run across in the wild as readable (or more) than tex documents.

Excellent

Latex is so ugly to write though; How about Docbook?

"Y is ugly; how about XML?"

This explains so many atrocities.

I'd rather write XML than use a system that still struggles with UTF-8 out of the box. \"{o} to get an ö? Installing a new package to get €? No thanks. It's sad that Latex still produces much better results than Openoffice or whatever.

"Struggles"? I think you're a bit overwrought.
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
...and get on with life.

That's ugly. You should use Xetex, that solves the problem better. Or Luatex.
(see the problem?)

Nope, don't see the problem! Already followed my own advice and got on with life. Your decision to use alternative flavours is entirely your own prerogative.

Except if you're dealing with an older installation and shitty templates. Okay, bad argument, that's not really Latex's fault anymore. Still not too fond of the syntax though.

Hmm, honestly, I haven't noticed this – in all those years I've been using LaTeX I've never encountered a single UTF-8 issue, writing in Slovak most of the time with all our diacritics. However, it's true I never needed the € symbol.

Anyway, I don't think it's that big a deal to add a \usepackage statement to the top of your source as long as it's a package that is installed in each major LaTeX distribution by default.

TeX/LaTeX has its flaws, of course. Its syntax is highly inconsistent and often it forces you to do things one way while you might want it another way. The latter is often an issue to newcomers to LaTeX when they want the page to be wider or whatnot and they fight all such defaults with varying degrees of success. However, in time some of them realize that a lot of these things are the way they are because it makes the output better readable.

And the former… Yes, it is inconvenient, but it is a sacrifice I'll make anytime to get the superior quality of output LaTeX gives me. Plus I can edit it in a regular text editor and the source can be written in a way that makes it still readable. (Well, at least most of the time; the source code of a CV might not be the best example what with all the tables and stuff…)

That \"{o} kinda makes sense, if the given limitations are ASCII. Pretty clever, too. At least you can figure out what it does by looking at it (assuming you know any tex). As far as packaging goes, that comes with being modular. It's akin to complaining about having to add an extension to Firefox to do X or Y.

That, and if you're good enough at computers to use Latex, chances are you know how to install a Latex module. Hell, most Linux distros do the work for you, Debian has packages for TeXlive that add extra modules and Arch has them in the main repositories. And MiKTEX has a built-in package manager.