This is why the PDF format exists

And why everyone hates it, because when you feed it into their automated CV parser to scrape for details like your employment history and email, it doesn’t seem understand the format, or re-OCR’s the text to make errors, and out comes garbage.

Word is sadly the defacto way to get a foot in through the door

I would question the applicant’s computer literacy if they send me their CV as anything other than pdf. Basically never seen that though

Imagine you’re a firm drowning in CVs - surely you would feed everything into a PDF parser, ask an AI to summarize, and filter based on that. Good CVs can be missed this way. DocX is the safest option.

If the company is that incompetent, I’d only wanted to work there if I’m really desperate. I’d hope it never comes to this.

Might be different where you live or in your sector, but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries. The chance that the AI misses a statement that the applicant might be disabled and could sue for discrimination is too high.

Also, we have to open CVs in the browser within the hiring application, download is not allowed for data security reasons. The renderer for Word files is definitely not good enough to guarantee that the files render correctly.

Personally, we’re looking for highly skilled people in a specialized field, I’d never trust an AI summary, but we’re also not being swarmed by applicants. If the company looks for a barista, your approach might be better. But proofing computer literacy is not really necessary then anyway.