[wellylug] Linux on yourCV

Jonathan Harker jharker at massey.ac.nz
Fri May 14 09:58:24 NZST 2004


Enkidu wrote:
> On Thu, 13 May 2004 13:38:14 +1200, you wrote:
> 
>>That said, I can't think of any good reason why an actual employer would 
>>want it in a .doc. PDF seems like the way to go in that case.
>>
> 
> Because they have Word but not Acrobat Reader?
> 
>>As for all this bitching that PDFs do their job (they look the same 
>>every time) I say, Get Over It.
>>
> 
> No. I think it is arrogant of someone who wants me to give them a job
> to send it in a fixed format. They are saying that they know better
> than me how I want to read it!

They're almost certainly not intending that at all. Think of it this way: a CV 
  is a sales pitch. A candidate supplies you their CV in a nice snazzy way 
that they think will best win your heart. Whether they actually do so or not 
is irrelevant to this argument, but it is certainly not arrogant of them to try.

By this rationale, is it arrogant of Apple to only supply their iPod sales 
brochure in PDF format? Is it arrogant of Countdown to stuff fixed format 
coupon glossies in your snailmail box and not instead supply you a floppy disk 
containing the plain text?

I couldn't really care less what format a CV is in, and I certainly wouldn't 
bin a CV that was in PDF format without looking at it first in many of the 
free GPL viewers available, some of which are plugins for Konqueror and 
Nautilus. At the very least a PDF CV indicates the candidate has an awareness 
of cross-platform documents and possibly doesn't like Word.

Cheers,
J




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