Developing an attractive and impressive electronic resume is the first step in job hunting. It should be professional and informative that can fully display your detailed information, including your education, work experience, character, accomplishments, skills, talents and aptitude etc that can contribute to your job hunting.
Once you created your resume, you need to decide which format to be used to send your resume, there are many resume formats used among candidates or required by employers like Word, PDF, HTML and plain text, among which PDF and Word are two universally accepted document formats. Then, what format is best for you, the answer varies. Let's first have a look of each of the two.
Pros of sending a PDF resume
Format Keeps: If you save your resume as a PDF, all of your formatting will stay exactly the same. Your resume will look the same to your email recipient as it does to you.
Readily Accessible: A PDF file attachment can be easily accessed across computer platforms. Your email recipient, whether using a PC (Windows or Linux) or a Mac will be able to open and read your resume.
Virus Free: PDF is considered to be one of the safest file to send/receive via email, because virus can't hitch a ride, they are not able to conceal themselves within the text.
Secure Content: Unless the recipient opening your resume has the editing version of Adobe Acrobat or a similar proprietary software, isn't vulerable to the same level of plagiary or manipulation compared to Word document.
Cons of sending a PDF resume
Difficult to read: A PDF file can't be easily read by computers. When sending your resume in a PDF file format, it can't be easily incorporate into a searchable database. Unless physically scanned first, your PDF resume is invisible to corporate software that rifles through database searching for keywords and candidates.
Hard to open: The recipient must have Adobe Acrobat or a similar proprietary software in order to open and read PDF resume.
Trouble to create: For job seekers, it may be difficult for them to find the right software to convert documents to PDF
Advantages of transmitting a Word resume
- Word is standard is most business.
- It retains formatting so the resume will look the same on the receiving end as it looked when you send it.
- Word is easy for an email recipient to open, print and forward.
- Word document is easy to store and search by corporate database, according the to survey, more than 80 percent of employers are now placing resumes directly into searchable databases and an equal percentage of employers prefer to receive resumes by email.
- Some recruiters like to copy and paste relevant content from your resume into their own branded company template so that all the candidates are presented to their client in a consistent format with their company logo and contact details.
Disadvantage of transmitting a Word resume
- The Word resume that you attach to your email has a chance of arriving with gremlins because of different versions of Word.
- Viruses may conceal themselves in the text of Word resume. For this reason, some companies don't allow Word email attachment because of virus risks.
- Unlike PDF resume who is highly compatible and consistent in appearance across platforms, recipient using different operation systems like PC or Mac may not able to open it.
- Content may not safe. When opened by recipient, your resume is vulnerable to plagiary. It can be copied and adulterated. It can be manipulated the same way your can manipulate it on your end.
Having talked too much about the two formats, it is still at your side deciding which format to use. Perhaps, after taking into full consideration of every aspect at your side and at employer's as well. It is advisable to employ the combination of the use of both two format in order to avoid unnecessary troubles.
Candidates who have PDF resume that want it to be Word format are advised to use PDF to Word Converter.
Similarly, employees having Word resume and want to change to PDF format can try Word to PDF Converter.
