Should You PDF Your Resume?

Visual Support for Your Personal Brand

In most cases, your resume is a visual presentation of your professional talent and qualifications.  It is a one of the primary communication tools of a job seeker.  In absence of a face to face meeting, your resume is your best opportunity put your best foot forward.  So selecting a format that serves your message and image will help to differentiate you from the competition.  This assumes that the viewer is a human, which is not always the case.

Why Use PDF Format?

When you create your resume in Microsoft Word, not all of the formatting features automatically translate for viewing on other computers. Some notable examples:

• You may have selected an expressive font to distinguish yourself.  But unless that font is installed on the computers of your desired viewers, it will never be seen and appreciated.
• Perhaps you worked for hours to tweak the formatting in Word to insure that your content precisely fit on one or two pages. It’s possible that all your work will be wasted as there’s no guarantee that your document will display the same way on other’s set-ups.

Also, Word documents can easily be edited by others without your control or permission.  While it is true that PDFs can also be altered but it is not as easy or time efficient. Most people lack the skills and the software.

Submitting a PDF resume can also convey that you’re tech savvy. This little conveyance of competency also serves to address concerns of hiring decision makers over hiring more senior candidates.

So if you know your resume will be viewed exclusively by humans, and your formatting will help differentiate you, PDF-ing your resume will assure that what you see is what they get.  You can create your document in MS Word and then convert it to PDF.  This allows you to share the version most appropriate for your audience.

And now you can…

Convert Your Word Doc to PDF Format for FREE

If you don’t own Adobe Acrobat, you can still covert your PDF  documents. There is a free application, PDF 995 that will do the job for you.  It works like a printer driver.  So any document or file that can be printed can be PDF-ed.   PDF995 offers both a free version and a Pro version.  The free version is slower and has ads.  But is functional enough for most applications.

Why NOT Use PDF?

PDF format is not easily searchable in corporate database systems.  So this format should not be used if part of your audience is non-human.  Take care in understanding the needs of your recipient before selecting one of these formats:

• Microsoft Word
• ASCII (text)
• PDF (Portable Document Format)

Consider having all three formats prepared and use them to fit the needs of your target reader.