I eventually gave up on Word templates and now keep my resume in LaTeX. Neat and organized - not unlike this example only with more detail and nicer fonts :)
Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.
My experience has been that great workplaces sometimes have Whitt luck with recruiters, so you’ll end up judging a book by its cover. But one only has time to make so many applications, and you gotta filter them somehow, so why not by recruiter skill?
I see obviously not-the-original resumes from basically every recruiter. If you tell a recruiter "we need someone with senior FOOlang experience", the next day there will be six resumes, one of which has an organic "brought in FOOlang to orchestrate object frackers, reducing development time" and five of which have "N years FOOLAND" inserted into a Skills section in a different font.
This is interesting...what do you suspect is behind this? Do recruiters just tell candidates "Hey, make sure to put FOOlang on your resume before you apply to this job."
No, I'm strongly implying that many recruiters will just change resumes with minimal regard for the truth. Note the difference between FOOlang and FOOLAND, among other things...
Woah, that is way more insidious than I was expecting. I get what you mean now, and that just seems really stupid on the recruiter's part. Doesn't it come out during the interview process if there's BS on the resume?
But I'm guessing that's your point, right? Because the hiring manager should notice, and the interview process should screen for it, so this must be a symptom of much larger scale dysfunction in the tech recruiting/hiring space.
> Doesn't it come out during the interview process if there's BS on the resume?
Oh yes. As the candidate this is also great when the interviewer says something like “It says here you’ve worked with x” and you go “I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t on there when I submitted the resume (to the recruiter), let me see that” and it turns out like the OP said, extra skill added in a different font.
Yep, I've been surprised by the contents of my resume at an interview set up by a recruiter once.
"It says on your resume you have extensive experience in X."
"I do not."
They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out and pasting their ugly letterhead over the top. Which I suppose they could still do with a PDF if they have Acrobat Pro.
> They also have a thing for stripping your name and contact details out
This makes some amount of sense because they want to avoid the company bypassing the recruiter and their commission. I was once hired like this (although I didn't know it until much later, when the owner told me). I think it's a realistic and reasonable fear.
I have a "redacted" version of my CV for this purpose which removes the personal information, but I can't recall I ever actually used it since I haven't really used recruiters for a decade.
Resume manipulation is actually more common than you think if you go through a 3rd party recruiter, the ones that cold call you for jobs.
They usually strip the content from it and drop it into a container resume that has their details so that they get credit from the hire I assume. lol. That being said, whatever the poster was doing to stop the resume from being edited is moot. They will just copy the content from the PDF and paste it into a new one.
I just answered my own question, since I had the MS report in Word.
I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh.
Unforunately, being able to read the document is already sufficient access to make your own copy and alter it however you please.
The best you can do is a digital signature[1], which proves that the document has not been tampered with. Of course, it's up to the recipient to ask for a signed document and to actually check if the signature is still present and accurate upon receipt. Otherwise, it's very trivial for a third-party to remove the signature and add their own edits.
In some pdf readers there is an option "respect limitations"… by disabling it you can print even when print is disallowed and so on. I guess it's the same with word documents.
Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.