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Comment by grtrthnstupid | Hacker News Reader

FYI I am working with a professional placement agency and I used to use LaTeX. The specific feedback I received regarding my resume is that modern resume parsers are MUCH better at reading from docx than pdf. So, to increase my chances, I had to give up LaTeX. Unless you are trying to impress a specific employer whom you know is not putting your resume through an automated screener

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That makes sense. The main reason I don’t use docx for that stuff (outside of not wanting to pay for a license for mediocre software) is that I used to have a big problem with recruiters destroying all the formatting of my resume by inserting their ugly logo on the top. PDFs are harder to modify like that, and if they insisted on it in docx I could say “oh I can’t do that because it’s in LaTeX, here’s a link to the source though and make any changes you need”.

None of them ever once actually attempted to ruin the resume again.

FYI Libre Office can save files in docx, so you don’t have to pay for mediocre software.

Google Docs also allows you to download the document in that format. So, you can even do the resume job from your mobile.

Yeah I know, I have LibreOffice installed, and it's "generally ok" for docx stuff, though I will still have issues with more subtle formatting things, though that could be because I use WYSIWYG editors so infrequently that I don't really know what I'm doing anymore.

Pandoc + LaTeX has been generally "good enough" for everything I've needed so I don't have much of an incentive to learn.

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