Who’s going to fucking arrest you? The resume police? :rolleyes:
HR is the resume police. :smack:
I used to convert my resume to pdf as well, mostly because due to differing versions or settings on MS Word, my resume might open up with different formatting than I used. I don’t know why different copies (of the same version) of Word do different things, but I’ve opened up my resume to update it on various computers, and have the years for my work experience (for example), which I spaced to the far right of a line, bumped down to the next line, essentially making the entire resume unreadable.
Now I just stick them all in pdf. There’s no chance that the HR people will think I don’t give a fuck about how my resume looks.
I find this really surprising, since it’s not certain that your prospective resume reader will have Word installed, but it is a near-certainty that he’ll have Acrobat Reader. I dislike PDF files as much as the next guy (they’re useful for things that will be printed on paper, but worse than useless for online stuff, and mostly used for things that don’t get printed), but Word is a much worse choice.
Plus, a Word document will display on your prospective employer’s display with spellings it doesn’t like underlined in red squiggles, sentence fragments in more colored squiggles, etc. Any resume would look like crap when opened with Word.
I generally like plain text, but can see that for a resume it’s nice to have some formatting.