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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I particularly love recruiters who insist that you send them a resume in MS Word format, so that they can remove your contact details and stick their agency's ugly letterhead on top (or "improve" your resume for you if they're particularly unethical).

"I'll need your resume in Word Format."

"I can give you a PDF"

"Give me the original in Word Format."

"There is no original in Word Format, I wrote my resume in LaTeX. Besides, why do you need to be able to edit my resume?"

And... ghosted.

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> "Give me the original in Word Format."

Since they're all but certainly going to ghost you anyway, why not just

"Sure, here's the original. This is using features that aren't in the ancient Debian distribution of TeXlive; you'll want to follow the excellent instructions at https://github.com/posquit0/Awesome-CV to get XeLaTeX configured correctly (or it'll bomb out with the most inscrutable of errors).

I'm having a couple of locale issues with attaching files through pine at the moment, so I've pasted the source below. I trust it will not be difficult to copy-paste to a new file.

  %!TEX TS-program = xelatex
  %!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
  \documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{awesome-cv}
  \geometry{left=1.4cm, top=.8cm, right=1.4cm, bottom=1.8cm, footskip=.5cm}
  \fontdir[fonts/]
  \colorlet{awesome}{awesome-blue}
  \setbool{acvSectionColorHighlight}{true}
  .
  .
  .
  {\thepage}
  \end{document}

Let me know if there are any issues.

Thanks!"

You forgot to ask for their public PGP key!

That is an excellent suggestion.

In fact, that would be a great catalyst to weed out 99% of recruiters who aren't willing to make any sort of effort.

I'm not joking. I might just apply this one...

This almost screwed me in my last interview. (I still got the job thankfully). They took off my blog, mvp award, GitHub profile, and Stack Overflow account. I went into the interview with them thinking I had done nothing except my work history. When I found out, I snapped at the recruiter explaining those are important for them to see.

A few months ago a recruiter took off my title (ing. jr, similar to P. Eng.) from my resume because "it was not required for the position". I pay 500 bucks a year for that title; I was pretty pissed, to say the least.

I've had recruiters copy and paste the text from my nicely-formatted PDF into a Word document after I refused to give them an editable copy.

I no longer deal with recruiters if I can help it, but if I find myself using them again I'd consider offering to add their logo onto my CV myself to avoid them butchering it.

Probably 'ghosted' for mentioning the word 'latex'

That's a good point. They may have been ignorant of the technology and thought OP was making a lewd joke!

But LaTeX is pronounced differently from latex.

Besides, why do you need to be able to edit my resume?

I can't speak for tech recruiting companies, but at the company I work for removing the header is a method of anonymizing the resume to prevent unconscious gender/race/etc... bias based on someone's name, city, ZIP Code, etc...

I've had my current recruiter tell potential employers that I "view QA courses on Udemy.com to lower coding mistakes before it goes to QA dept."

I don't do QA courses. I do TDD development. And I never mentioned Udemy.com to them either.

They put words in my mouth.

This sounds a lot like the kind of stories we are looking for! We would really appreciate if you could share the story with us.

Particularly ironic as Word has been able to open and edit PDFs for a while.

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