I prefer to post my resume on job sites (i.e., Monster, etc.) as a pdf, but does this render my resume unsearchable by potential employers who often run some algorithm to perform word searches within resumes for keyword or phrases? For this reason alone, is posting my resume as a Word document more desirable than posting a pdf?
If you convert a Word document to a PDF (by “saving as PDF” if such an option is available, or by a “print-to-PDF” software driver), it yields a structured text document with explicit font and layout, not that different from the original Word document in function. That means its content is searchable.
If you just scan a printed document as a PDF, that’s different, because the PDF is just a bitmap image of the pages, and that’s not searchable without some OCR-type image-to-text processing.
So, which kind of PDF are you talking about? That’s your answer.
PDFs are perfectly searchable; dunno why you’d think otherwise.
They are not “perfectly searchable” if you use a copier to e-mail a PDF version of a paper copy of document you scanned. It’s a very common way to end up with a PDF that someone has e-mailed you but you discover you either can’t copy and paste from at all, or it ends up a weird misspelled hash when OCR tries to interpret text that was scanned in from as low quality print out.
It’s also an issue with some, especially pre-1990s, journal articles that someone submitted for archiving by copying/scanning an actual hard copy journal once upon a time.
OP, open the PDF. Can you copy and paste the text? If yes, it’s searchable. If not, it isn’t.
How do you create the PDF? To summarize what has been explained, if you export it from Word or other app, then the text is preserved and is searchable. If you scan paper, it will be images and not searchable.
As a hiring manager, I am curious as to why you prefer to post a PDF, because I prefer to receive Word documents. I may be unusual in this but I have a VBA macro that runs an analysis on the resume to calculate years of experience and identify overlaps and gaps in experience, and highlight keywords relevant to the position. Because it’s VBA it only works in Word. Monster will also show you a Word version of a PDF but they image the pages in the PDF file and populate a Word file with those images.
I should back up and give some background to my question: Yes, I do create my pdf files as a print-to-pdf. Yet, once I upload my resume to Monster (to store as my one active resume for employers to search), it seems it is just an image. So, at best, they are searching whatever searchable fields Monster may have about me. One would wager my resume is ultimately not searchable.
However, if I uploaded a Word file, would an employer’s search on Monster include the actual resume itself? …Or, just the same searchable fields as presumed above?
I prefer the PDF because I have found the format of a Word document begins to change. The margins, for one, are not correct thereby making the formatting look terrible.
Formatting is irrelevant to a search utility.
When I download PDF resumes from Monster they are text-based. In fact I copy the whole thing and paste into Word. The formatting is gone but my utility can still scan it.
It’s only the Word version that is images–they automate turning the pages of the PDF file into images then build the Word file with images.
Searches are indexing your PDF file.