Posted under Resumes on September 14th, 2007
If you’re among the early adopters of MS Word 2007, you’ll want to remember when sending attachments that not all employers have upgraded to the latest version of Word. A manager at a One-Stop Career Center told me last week that he’s been getting resumes for a position the center has posted, but he hasn’t been able to open a couple because of compatibility issues. Fortunately for the job seekers, this manager took the time to send them a note to that effect, thus giving them a second chance to submit their documents.
Most hiring managers won’t be that considerate - this particular manager, after all, is in the business of assisting job seekers, so it was natural for him to want to educate the individuals who sent him unreadable files. More typically, employers are receiving so many resumes for any one position that they won’t take the time to give individual feedback of any sort and will simply move on to the next document. A 2007 CareerBuilder survey reported that 27% of managers receive more than 50 resumes for each open position, while 13% receive over 100 - they have more than enough qualified candidates without having to go to any extra lengths.
So remember to use the “save as” feature and save your documents to an earlier version of Word to make sure employers can read what you send them. A Word to the wise.
Posted by Wendy Gelberg
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Van Upboy on 02 Oct 2007 at 10:46 am #
Hi Wendy,
I recommend against sending a resume in word format, but using the acrobat pdf format instead. It cannot be modified, and about everyone has the acrobat pdf viewer. The disadvante is that you have to download a microsoft plugin to do this in Word 2007. I will write the how-to later this week on my blog.
Regards,
Van.