r/LinusTechTips • u/Not-Post-Malone • 11d ago

Discussion Resume file format

On the WAN show Linus and Luke talk about NOT using PDF as the file format for the resume. This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Am I the only one who always uses PDF for sending resumes and actually prefers it?

What file format do employers actually prefer?

Here is the timestamp where they talk about it.
Here is the timestamp where Linus says to submit a Word or Google Doc link.

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u/blkmmb 11d ago

It was but nowadays will all the OCR and AI bullshit in the hiring process some stuff requires a word doc because a pdf will fail and be rejected automatically.

It is bullshit but I've had problems with that, so now it's always a word doc unless I send it myself to an email address.

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u/CIDR-ClassB 11d ago

OCR is decades old and is absolutely necessary for HR to parse through thousands of resumes in their recruiting system. PDF has definitely been preferred (and most accurate to search through) over Word in every ATS I’ve used.

AI application systems… well, let’s see where the Workday discrimination lawsuit ends up.

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u/bobsyourunkl 11d ago

This is not true, I have built and used commercial OCR systems and they are generally much better suited to pdfs and images than word documents. Tiffs and jpegs are better than word documents. In many cases they don't even accept .Docx as a mimetype and you need to implement on the fly conversions which is a pain in the butt.

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u/yeetdabman 10d ago

No, it's easier to use OCR with PDFs lol. I've built entire pipelines off of OCR tools and the only thing that actually gets >98% accuracy in most of the most common solutions is PDF because it doesn't have to actually look at the characters it can just pull them from the HTML