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.

In the best case scenario, the recruiter called up twenty prospects and said "Quick question -- have you worked with FOOLAND?"

"You mean FOOlang? Yeah, a little."

"And what jobs did you have when you did that?"

"Uh, I learned a little about FOOlang in the job I had from 2010-2012, and then it came up again in the job in 2015."

"Thanks! I think I'll have something for you tomorrow."

And then the recruiter edits "Skills" to include six years of the still-misheard FOOLAND.

Everything else is worse.

> 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.

They only "came across" your résumé -- similar to how San Franciscans come across turds. 99 times out of 100 they didn't even bother to read it.

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.