Resume Encyclopedia: terminology, technology, formats, and practices.

If you do much shopping around for résumé services, you’ll probably find yourself confused by some terms. It’s not your fault. Some terms aren’t used consistently, and can have several very different meanings. Some don’t always mean what you’d expect them to mean. Others, like “e-résumé,” sound significant but don’t really mean anything. And others, like “RTF” or “CV,” just aren’t familiar—or even relevant—to everyone.

And there are many important aspects of résumé technology that aren’t widely known—even though ignoring them causes many résumés to be passed over by employers.

This glossary will help you understand these terms and technologies, and help you make better-informed shopping decisions about résumé services. You’ll find further information about résumés on the Tips & Myths page—including discussions of killer myths that can wreck your job search even if you do everything else right.

A4 is the name of the standard metric paper size used for letters (and résumés) everywhere in the world except the U.S. and Canada. A4 paper is 21.0 cm x 29.7 cm, which is 8.268" x 11.693". It’s a little narrower and a little longer than U.S. letter size—so it doesn’t quite fit in most things designed to hold U.S.-letter−sized sheets. If you send your U.S.-letter−size résumé to someone outside the U.S. or Canada, it will be a bit of a nuisance for them to handle and file along with other paper. Even if you e-mail it, it will be a bit of a nuisance to print out. You don’t want your résumé to be a nuisance—if you’re sending it outside the U.S. or Canada, you should send it in A4 size, even if it’s an electronic document. (I can provide electronic documents in A4 size.)

Another reason to use A4 paper for your international CV is that it shows that you are aware of international standards, and willing to work with them. (Many Americans aren’t.) An international employer will appreciate that.

You can print your CV out on US letter-size paper to read the copy, but the margins won’t look the way they will on A4 paper, and copy close to the edge may be cut off. If you’ve set up your document in A4 format, the screen display will show you what the résumé looks like on an A4 sheet. (In Microsoft Word, be sure you’re using Page Layout view.)

Since you will usually be e-mailing your CV, you can get by without using any A4 paper at home. But it should still be set up in A4 size, so the recipient can print it out. And if you travel abroad for an interview, you’ll want to have some copies on A4 handy to give to people. If you create any sort of paper documents to send overseas, it can be handy to have some A4 around.

FINDING A4 PAPER: If you’re planning on having your A4 résumé output at a copy shop, be aware that copy shops in the U.S. are unlikely to have A4 paper. They should be able to output A4 documents on A4 paper that you provide. You can find sources on the Web for A4 paper by the ream (500 sheets); some retail paper dealers or well-stocked business stationers may also have it, at least in large cities. (If you’re in the U.S., a ream may last you a lifetime.)

The metric envelope size that corresponds to A4 is referred to as “DL”. It’s 22.0 cm x 11.0 cm, which is 8.66" x 4.33". You may be able to find airmail envelopes in this size at a well-stocked stationery store. If you can, they will add a professional touch to international correspondence. However, you can use standard U.S. letter-size (#10) envelopes with A4 paper—A4 folded into thirds will fit neatly into a #10 envelope.

Your cover letter is usually the first thing seen by whoever starts the process of screening you for a job. So it’s your crucial first impression. A bad cover letter could put you right out of the running; a good one could put you at the top of the pile. The cover letter is also your chance to make points that can’t be made in a résumé, and to highlight those of your strengths that are of particular interest to each employer.

For higher-level jobs, and where the employer requests a cover-letter with an application, your cover letter will probably travel with your résumé. However, for junior positions, cover letters aren’t invariably transmitted up the ladder along with your résumé, especially in electronic applicant processing (ATS) environments. So the essential points need to be in the résumé.

Thank-you letters (sometimes called “follow-up letters”) are also important. They establish a civil personal relationship with the person who has interviewed you. They give you a chance to express your continued interest in the job—a factor to which employers are very sensitive. And they also give you a chance to make or re-emphasize points you overlooked or under-emphasized in the interview, or that occurred to you only after learning more about the employer during the interview. A good thank-you letter can boost your standing with a potential employer, and could make the difference between being rejected and being called back for another interview.

Effective cover letters and thank-you letters must be individualized for each job you apply for. There’s no getting around that. And it’s well worth the effort, because sending form letters is a serious mistake. People who are hiring want to see that your interests and experience are a good fit for their firm and for the particular job, and that you have a definite interest in working for them. Generic letters don’t cut it—they want concrete details that show you’re thinking about that job and their company.

I make it as easy as possible to customize effective, factual letters for each prospect. I provide cover- and thank-you letters in the form of templates, with alternate paragraphs you can chose from to tailor the letters for each application. I provide instructions for using the templates, and examples to show how the letter should look.

My letter templates will help you apply the same approach to job seeking that a BTB sales professional applies to sales. You should do some research on a firm before you send an application to them, and look at writing letters in something like the way you would look at putting together a business proposal. As you may know, corporate business proposals are often based on templates—but they’re carefully individualized for each prospect. Job letters should be the same.

(By the way, I’ve been offering customizable cover- and thank-you letter templates since Crystal Résumés started in 2008. Back then, nobody else offered anything like them. In recent years, they seem to have caught on.)

“Curriculum vitae” (“CV”) has one meaning in the U.S., and another internationally.

1) In the U.S., “curriculum vitae” is the term for what an academic (or any professional who does research, writing, and/or teaching) uses instead of (or along with) a résumé. For short, it’s often called a “CV,” a “vitae,” or, less correctly, a “vita.” In addition to the material commonly found in a résumé, a CV lists such credentials as: dissertations, publications and conference papers, residencies, lectureships, fellowships, grants, special research activities, organizational responsibilities, etc. With all of this material, the CVs of experienced people can run to six or eight pages, or even longer. Some job-seekers in these fields may need both a CV and a résumé, depending on what type of job they are applying for.

The term “academic CV” (or “professional CV,” or “academic curriculum vitae,” etc.) might be used to make it clear that you’re using the term in the U.S. sense. But that’s taken for granted within the academic and professional worlds in the U.S., and “curriculum vitae” or “CV” is commonly used alone.

At Crystal Résumés, I write and format academic, professional, and scientific CVs as well as résumés. CVs are listed and priced separately on the Services page. I have professional editorial experience in scholarly and technical publishing and in academia, so I understand the special editorial requirements of CVs. They will be thoroughly professional in language and presentation, and will follow the bibliographic and other styles appropriate for your discipline.

Nursing CVs have a special format, quite unlike regular résumés. Like all CVs, they emphasize professional qualifications and formal training to a greater extent than do résumés. In nursing, sometimes they’re referred to as “résumés,” sometimes they’re called “CVs.” You’ll see healthcare employers and nurses (and résumé or career specialists) using either term for a standard clinical nursing résumé. This confuses people, but in nursing, both terms usually refer to the same thing. HOWEVER, nurses with a lot of research, publications, and presentations will distinguish between a résumé and a CV, and may use both—the CV, with full detail on publications, etc., for administrative and research jobs, and the résumé for clinical caregiving jobs.

Nursing CVs have one thing in common with regular résumés: unless they list an unusual amount of research or special background, they are usually two to three pages long—shorter than other CVs (which commonly have long lists of publications, etc.). This is about the length of a normal résumé for an experienced person in a demanding field.

2) Internationally, “curriculum vitae” or “CV” covers what the U.S. calls both “résumés” and “CVs.” Some countries use other terms: Germany says “Lebenslauf,” in Australia it’s called a “résumé.” But in International English, British English, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, “curriculum vitae” (borrowed from Latin) is the common term. (Spanish and Portuguese also use “currículo.”) The phrase “international CV” is sometimes used in the U.S., to make it clear that you’re talking about the international kind, not about an American academic or professional CV.

An international CV is a different thing from a U.S. résumé. It is likely to contain more information than is found on a U.S. résumé—including personal information that you can never put on a résumé in the U.S. Different countries may have somewhat different expectations for what information goes into a résumé, and how it should be written. Normally, however, international job-seekers are applying in multiple countries, and an international CV is written to cover all possible non-U.S. requirements. I provide international CVs in A4 format, the standard document size outside the U.S. and Canada. For practical information on A4 format, see the A4 article.

Grammar, pronunciation, and usage of the terms “CV” and “curriculum vitae”

It’s normal—and absolutely proper—to avoid grammatical and pronunciation issues with this term by using the abbreviation CV (pronounced, in English, see-vee, plural CVs), or the term “vitae.” Preferred practice may vary, depending on the professional field, or even the region.

But you should know that, if you’re speaking English, “curriculum vitae” is pronounced ka-RIK-ya-lum VIE-tee (second word rhymes with “mighty”). The plural isn’t needed that often, and most people who find they need it probably just say “CVs” or “vitaes” (VIE-teez). That, in fact, is the best way of handling the issue in most fields. It’s also proper, but not common, to use “curricula vitae,” which is the Latin plural of “curriculum vitae.” “Curricula vitae” may be preferred in some fields in which Latin terms are more fully preserved. (The Latin plural is not “curricula vitarum,” which implies that each document deals with more than one life.) And if you start out saying “curriculum vitae,” realize halfway through that you need to make it plural, and tack an ‘s’ on the end, you’ll probably be okay.

Other languages that use the term have their own ways of pronouncing it, and of forming the plural.

Don’t try going back to the Classical Latin pronunciation—unless, of course, you are speaking Classical Latin (which is occasionally heard here at Crystal Résumés). But for the record, the Classical Latin pronunciation is kuh-RIK-oo-lum WEE-tie (second word rhymes with “sweet eye”). It’s Latin for “the course of (someone’s) life”—which is the original meaning of the word “career.”

(If you’re applying for a job at the Vatican, you’ll usually find a different pronunciation of Latin in use there, and will probably be communicating in Italian or International English, not in Latin. Not, that is, unless you’re applying to the Latin Letters Office of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. I hear they’re understaffed.)

The term “e-résumé” (electronic résumé) does not refer to a particular résumé format or type of résumé. It is a general term for any résumé that is transmitted electronically—that is, for any résumé other than a paper résumé. E-résumés include résumés in plain-text, HTML, and PDF formats, as well as word-processor résumés (Word or, in the past, RTF) sent electronically (as they usually are, these days).

“E-résumé” may have some use as a general concept because it reminds you that making the best use of electronic résumés requires meeting a much wider range of technical requirements than paper résumés have to meet. But outside of that, it’s misleading, because the different types of e-résumés have little or nothing in common beyond the fact that they’re electronic rather than paper. They are based on different and unrelated technologies, and have different purposes. So they have very different technical requirements and must be used in different ways. Thus, learning about them means learning about each one separately. For more information about them, see the entries for each in this Résumé Encyclopedia.

Federal job applications require résumés of a different style than is used for other job searches. They typically run from three to five pages, but can run longer. Federal résumés must provide information that private-sector résumés don’t, and must give a fuller account of your experience. They also have to be formatted to fit the various online job applications used by different federal agencies—USAJOBS, Resumix, Avue. (At least in theory, a single, generic federal résumé can be made that is adaptable to the different systems with some tweaking.)

Federal job applications also require special narrative statements—KSAs, ECQs, MTQs, etc.—that give extensive concrete illustrations of your experience. These statements range from a half a page to one-and-a-half pages each, depending on the situation.

ECQ: Executive Core Qualifications, the five standard attributes required for all Senior Executive Service (SES) positions: 1) Leading Change, 2) Leading People, 3) Results Driven, 4) Business Acumen, 5) Building Coalitions/Communications. In addition to evidence of field-specific qualifications, SES applicants must provide five narrative statements giving concrete examples of their attainments in each of these areas.

ECQ statements are typically each a page to a page and a half long. They should be tailored for each application, to focus on the precise match between your abilities and those required for the position. Job announcements will sometimes specify particular issues to be addressed in the ECQs.

KSA: KSA stands for “Knowledges, Skills, and Abilities.” Different KSA statements are required for different jobs, reflecting the particular key skills required for each job. They must give concrete evidence of your possession and successful use of the knowledge/skill/ability.

KSAs are typically from half a page to one page long (maximum 3000 characters, about 600 words). You will normally be asked to submit several of them, occasionally as many as twelve. (If you need more than a few, they’ll usually be on the shorter side.)

MTQ: Mandatory Technical Qualifications. These are narrative statements similar to KSAs, but they may run longer, up to two pages. Different MTQs will be required for different jobs, reflecting the particular technical skills required for each job. The announcement will give details on what is required.

PTQ: Professional (and) Technical Qualifications. Similar to MTQs. Different PTQ statements will be required for different jobs, reflecting the particular professional qualifications and technical skills required for each job.

USAJOBS: USAJobs is the official employment website of the federal government (https://www.usajobs.gov/), operated by OPM. (Originally, at least, it was managed by Monster for the OPM.) It represents an attempt, still incomplete, to standardize and centralize the federal recruitment and hiring process. But some agencies may still list their jobs on their own sites, and not on USAJobs.gov.

The USAJobs résumé format and résumé builder is designed to be a standard federal résumé format in that it contains all the information required for job applications to all federal agencies. Individual agencies may vary in terms of how much of that information they require, and how they want it presented.

Only a very small number of fonts are both typographically suitable for résumés and present on all computers. The fontware that makes fonts printable doesn’t get transmitted along with Word documents (or most other documents that use them—PDFs being the exception). If the person receiving your résumé doesn’t have the fonts you used to compose it, another font will be substituted. Lines will rerun, page breaks will change, and the appearance and readability of your résumé will be seriously degraded.

To be typographically suitable for résumés, a face must be well-designed, readable and legible at smaller sizes on desktop printed output, space-efficient, and pretty conventional looking. Most of the fonts that are more or less universally available on computers don’t meet these criteria.

Many résumé writers (and virtually all graphic designers) are not aware of issues of font suitability and availability. (Often, they learn about these subjects from “authorities” who are not well-informed. These authorities are usually graphic designers. Graphic designers have been radically ignorant of typographic technology and functional issues since long before the desktop era. The real typographic work was done by technical typographic production specialists.) It’s not unusual to see résumé writers—including some expensive and highly certified ones—using fonts that aren’t universally available. Their résumés may come out looking very bad on the employer’s side.

Among serif fonts (serifs are the little pointy extensions on the ends of most strokes in a letter), for a long time, the only universally available font that was suitable for résumés was Times. In recent years, Georgia has become widely enough available to be considered safe as far as availability is concerned. Georgia was designed—and very well designed—as standard serif face for websites. (It’s used for all serif type on this site except our logo.) It is also a good, readable face for print usage. BUT résumés usually require efficient use of space, and Georgia is much less space-efficient than Times: it requires up to about 15% more room for the same wordage (unless its set with the letters so close together that the text looks bad, a trick which some graphic designers will try). On the rare occasions that space-efficiency is not needed for a résumé I'm preparing, I’ll use Georgia.

Sans-serif faces (no serifs) are usable for résumés, but are somewhat inferior in readability and legibility to serif faces for text, and especially for smaller-sized, number-intensive text like résumés. (In many sans-serif faces, the characters I, l, i, and 1 aren’t sufficiently distinguishable, especially on screen, and can cause hitches or mistakes in rapid reading—which is the kind of reading résumés get.) For this reason, they are less often used for résumés. Arial, an inferior imitation of Helvetica, was for a long time the only sans-serif face universally available. (Helvetica itself is common mainly on Macs, though most computers will automatically substitute Arial for Helvetica, or vice versa, depending on which is available.)

FOR THE CURIOUS—MORE ABOUT RÉSUMÉ FONTS

GEORGIA: THE HISTORY. Georgia is in fact a cross between Times and a typeface called Century Schoolbook. Times was originally designed for space efficiency first and foremost—as a text face for newspapers, where space-efficiency was critical. Legibility is also important for newspapers, and Times is a famously legible face, but there were still tradeoffs in favor of space-efficiency. (The original Times was, and is, Times New Roman. But that story is too long for this page.) Century Schoolbook, on the other hand, was designed without any regard for space-efficiency at all. It was designed for elementary-level schoolbooks, where all that counted was legibility for easy reading. Legibility is also crucial for screen displays, which are still often of lower resolution than the print applications for which Times was devised. They can’t hold the fine detail that Times took advantage of to minimize the tradeoff between legibility and space-efficiency. This is why Georgia looks better on screen than Times, at the sizes normally used for text. It also works better on screen than Century Schoolbook, since the subtleties of a letterform’s curves should be optimized for screen display, which was not an issue when Century Schoolbook was designed.

GARAMOND. A fairly common example of an inappropriate résumé font—an inappropriate text font, for that matter—is the standard computer font commonly labeled “Garamond.” But there are many different Garamonds, and they’re not all the same. They don’t even all have “Garamond” in their names. The classic Garamonds, whatever they are called, are highly esteemed text faces for printed books (and one of my favorites). However, they don’t look as good on desktop printer output or on screen, especially at smaller sizes, since they have fine details that require high resolutions—typically 1200 dpi—to render properly. They were designed for printing, where resolution is not an issue (as long as the paper is reasonably good). In addition, the standard computer font commonly labeled “Garamond” is actually a font called ITC Garamond, which is radically different from the classic Garamonds. It was designed for advertising, not books or periodicals. It is far from space-efficient, and still requires very high resolution for good rendering. The people who chose ITC Garamond as a standard computer font, way back when, apparently didn’t know this when they went looking for a “Garamond.”

The words “format” and “formatting” have several well-established conventional meanings in the graphic communications industries—all related, but referring to different things. This doesn’t cause confusion among communications professionals, but some clarification can be helpful when communications professionals talk to their customers. The best approach is to explain the nuances, and point out that the nuances aren’t profoundly important—you could just about take “format” in all cases as a vague general term meaning “form” or “structure.”

What is important is that you remember that “format” and “formatting” may refer to any of three different categories, and that those categories don’t overlap:

1) Document formats (or file formats)—referring to the electronic format—not the visual format—of a document that exists as a computer file. The document format is the set of coding conventions that make documents of each type perform the way they’re supposed to when handled by software designed to work with them. Computers distinguish the formats of electronic documents by the three-letter (sometimes four-letter) extensions to the right of the dot in the filename, and those extensions are often used as the names of the formats. This category includes Word (.docx, .doc, or .docm), plain text (.txt), PDF (.pdf), RTF (.rtf), HTML (.html or .htm), etc. (There are articles here on most of these.)

2) The visible details of the graphic formatting of the text in a document: boldface, italic, spacing, indents, etc. (This is sometimes spoken of as “the formatting of the document.”) As a verb, formatting means applying those features to a given document: “I’ll format your résumé,” and so on.

3) The overall physical format—the outside edges—of a document or image, that is, the size and orientation of the visual space: letter-size, legal-size, portrait (vertical), landscape (horizontal), A4, etc.

There’s a lot of talk about using Google Docs for résumés, and a ton of résumé templates are available for Google Docs.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this. I’d love to be able to use and recommend an alternative to MS Word. I could go on for paragraphs, with much technical detail, about how happy that would make me and exactly why. But I’ve tried the other candidates over the years, and none has ever proved suitable for résumés. (I don’t use Word for anything else. But I use a lot more of Word than most users, including résumé writers. Even the techniques most Word users are familiar with aren’t sufficient for résumés.)

A major problem for Google Docs is its incompatibility with the ATS systems used by employers for processing résumés. That alone is enough to rule it out. You’ll see people on the Web saying that the solution is to download the Google Docs résumé as a PDF, and send the PDF to the employer. But PDFs don’t do any better with ATS systems. (For details, see the article on PDFs below.)

Google Docs documents can also be converted to Word documents (.docx), but they won’t keep their visual formatting reliably after conversion. That’s a problem for résumés, especially for people who need to maintain a professional appearance. The results can be especially bad when the résumés run to more than one page.

Not to mention that those people who talk about using Google Docs for résumés are normally talking about using templates. But templates are never a good idea for résumés, except perhaps for some very junior job-seekers or people doing unskilled work. Too many templates look out-and-out tacky, too many of them don’t work well with ATS systems, and, again, templates are apt to present additional challenges when the résumé goes to more than one page.

“Hosting” (as in “Web hosting”) usually refers to the service of providing space on a Web server for Web sites. (A Web site can consist of a single Web page or many.) Web servers (and the companies that operate them) have all the technology and connections needed to allow the hosted sites to be accessed directly, by anyone who has the site’s URL (Web address) and an Internet connection. All Web sites have such a host.

In the context of Web use, “posting” usually refers to putting information on an existing Web site. That information appears within the Web site. In Web sites that allow free posting, viewing posted information usually involves looking at a lot of advertising, or jumping through a lot of hoops designed to get the viewer to do something that makes money for the host. The person posting the information usually has little or no control over how it is displayed.

Posting a résumé on a job site often means just pasting your plain-text résumé into a form. The information is then added to the site’s database. Employers will find it only when searching for résumés of people with certain qualifications—which means they’ll be looking at other people’s résumés as well as your own. You’ll have no control over how your résumé looks.

Keep in mind that only a tiny fraction of jobs are filled through third-party job sites like Indeed.com, or Careerbuilder.com, or LinkedIn. Keep in mind also that sometimes there is information that you will want to put on a resume that you hand to selected potential employers, but that shouldn’t go on the public Web.

For much more about on-line job sites, see the On-line Job Sites article in the Tips & Myths section.

Keywords are common terms for job titles, skills, key technology, sub-specialties, types of experience, key industry players, and other factors that indicate the experience and ability needed for a particular job. A large and growing number of employers and recruiters use applicant-tracking systems (ATS) that process digital résumés and search them for keywords that are used as indicators of an applicant’s suitability for a given job. The documents are scored on the basis of the keyword count. Decisions about who gets called in for an interview are made on the basis of those scores.

NOTE: Many employers deliberately write job postings without the keywords they are looking for. This is to prevent people from copying keywords from the postings. This is one reason (but not the only one) why job postings often look so fluffy and unreal. Résumé writers and job-seekers who use this fluff in resumés, in the belief that these are keywords, are barking up the wrong tree.

Real keywords are also important for human reading, especially when, as is often the case, the person is making a quick scan of the résumé to decide if it’s worth a closer look.

Keywords are important, but they’re heavily over-hyped. See the SEO/Keywords article in the Tips & Myths section.

THERE IS, OF COURSE, MUCH MORE TO ATS OPTIMIZATION THAN KEYWORDS. A crucial part of ATS optimization for résumés is compatibility with the technical requirements (or limitations) of the ATS systems. I discuss this elsewhere, when talking about the various document formats used for résumés, but it comes down to this: ATS systems don’t process anything well except Word files and plain-text files, and they have problems with some common visual formatting techniques used in Word résumés. (For more detail, see Technical Issues With Word Résumés, below.)

However, Word résumés are what the humans in HR need to see, and what you need to send with your job application. So the way the Word résumés are formatted is critical for ATS Optimization.

(Don’t send more than one format to the HR people. It will only confuse them, and they may not use the right format for the right purpose. You can send a PDF of your résumé to people outside HR once you’ve gotten to that stage, and in some industries you should. When manually pasting your résumé into online forms, you should use the plain-text version of the résumé that I’ll send, and you should always manually populate the forms if you have that option, even though it’s a fair amount of trouble. It gets the best results with ATS processing.)

It would require a considerable investment to make ATS systems that could handle more types of files. The companies that make those systems are under no pressure to make that investment. This is partly because the ATS systems are just relatively small parts of more comprehensive business management systems.

If the use of the words “format” and “formatting” seems confusing here, that’s because it is. See the article on this, above.

(Optional reading: If you sometimes get the impression, from résumé-service websites, that ATS and keywords are sort of the same thing, it’s because some of the sales copy used with the “ATS” buzzword is recycled from copy formerly used in hype for the buzzwords “keywords” and “SEO”. The people recycling it probably don’t know that it was previously recycled from copy used twenty years ago and more, when paper résumés were the norm and the buzzword was “scannable résumés,” referring to a second version of your résumé that you sent in on paper to be fed into optical scanning machines.)

A networking résumé is a one-page condensation of your résumé. Networking résumés are typically used in non-hiring situations, when you want to give someone an outline of your experience and capabilities without making them sort through detail that is relevant only to hiring situations. (NOTE: A headhunter who will not read your full résumé is not a serious headhunter.)

OCR scanning (commonly referred to as just plain “scanning”) is a technology used for converting printed words (or digital pictures of words) into digital text that can be processed like any other text fed into a computer.

Around the turn of the century, when it was still common for people to send in paper résumés with job applications, it was common for employers to use OCR scanning as a means of processing the paper résumés they received. For a time, some résumé services offered “scannable résumés”—paper résumés that were specially formatted so that they could be easily and accurately scanned by the résumé-processing technology of the time. (Humans, however, would not willingly read them, since they lacked the visual formatting that made them easy to read and that allowed for a clear and flexible hierarchical structure of information.) When I started out, in 2008, scannable paper résumés were dead, but most résumé writers didn’t know that yet, and were still talking about them.

There used to be a lot of hype and confusion about “scannable résumés,” and many résumé-writing services continued the hype long after scannable paper résumés became obsolete. The same hype, often in the same words, was handed out about “searchable” résumés, when the generality of résumé services finally learned that MS Word résumés e-mailed in electronic form could be searched for keywords. Then “SEO résumés” became the buzzword, when search engines became a thing after Google was founded in 1998. It was all balled up together with keyword hype. Later, it was mixed in with LinkedIn search hype, when LinkedIn’s peculiar information structure became an issue for Web searches of LinkedIn profiles. Now the same hype is mixed in with the hype about the buzzword “ATS-optimized.”

Today, employers get résumés as electronic Word documents or (increasingly) in a online forms filled out by the applicant. These résumés go directly into today’s résumé-processing systems. (PDF résumés are not compatible with these systems, even if they’re on the “acceptable formats” list.)

Paper résumés are once again read only by people. You bring them with you to the first and subsequent interviews. Scannable paper résumés have been obsolete for twenty years or more.

The reality behind the hype, then and now, is the importance of the common practice of scanning résumé text for terms that somebody thinks are indicators of suitability for a given job. Humans were doing that long before computers were involved, and the same basic writing strategies made for effective résumés back then, though the nuances of various types of computerized processing also have to be taken into account with résumés today.

But many of the misconceptions and confusions remain, because many in the industry, even in the days of “scannable résumés,” didn’t know much about the technical reality. Many of their successors today don’t either—and don’t realize what has changed since the hype they’re still recycling was first written. Few of them today can even have any idea how old that hype is. They who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Back in the days of scannable-résumé hype and confusion, the term “scannable-résumé” could also mean:

2) Any résumé that is written to include keywords. (But, then as now, all résumés should be written to include keywords.)

Documents produced by many common software programs run into problems when they’re transmitted by e-mail or over the Internet. And any associated files (fonts and images used in a document) have to be transmitted separately along with the document if it is to print or display properly. (Word files are usually okay—as long as they use only the very few standard fonts that are found on most computers. But even most of these are not as universal as most people think. For more about this, see “Fonts for Word Résumés”, below.)

PDF technology provides a way around those problems—as long as no one is going to do anything with the document but look at it on screen or print it out.

The main problem with PDFs for résumés is that PDFs don’t work well with the applicant-tracking systems (ATSs) used by employers to process résumés. For this reason, Word résumés are preferred by HR people and recruiters. PDF résumés are most likely to be appreciated by other decision-makers in the hiring chain, who don’t have to do anything with the résumés except look at them and print them out, and who will appreciate the convenience and stability of the PDF format. You can e-mail the PDF to them directly, after you’ve gotten past HR.

In some fields, such as IT, engineering, and graphic communications, PDFs are commonly used whenever HR and recruiters aren’t in the loop. But unless you’re sure, don’t send someone a PDF unless they specifically say that they prefer a PDF to all other formats. (Just because PDF appears in a list of acceptable formats doesn’t mean that it won’t cause problems. The people who make up those lists don’t know about the technological problems associated with résumés.)

Another problem with PDFs for résumés is that they can’t be modified. Recruiters often need to reformat résumés they receive, and they can’t do this with PDFs. (Technically, yes, you can modify PDFs to a limited extent with Acrobat, or with Illustrator if you know how. I’ve done it. But you can’t modify them freely, and in most cases it’s impossible to make the modified PDFs look as good as the original if you change more than a few letters. Unless you know how to do it in Illustrator and you spend a lot of time on it—which doesn’t apply to recruiters. If anyone says otherwise, make them do some substantial revisions to a PDF while you watch.)

WHAT PDFS ARE GOOD FOR. Documents produced by common word-processing and graphics software programs (including Word, InDesign, and others) can be exported as PDF files. A PDF file “encapsulates” all the elements of the file (fonts, images, etc.) in a single file that is immune to the changes that can happen when files move from one digital environment to another. (Even when you’re e-mailing a file from one Windows machine to another, it’s likely to go by way of a Unix server, which is a different environment. That’s not a problem for PDFs.)

A PDF is a sort of high-quality snapshot of the original file. PDF is, in one important sense, the most stable document format: almost anyone can print out a PDF, even if they don’t have a word processor, and it will always look exactly the same no matter what fonts, software, or operating system are used by the person you send it to. PDFs can be read on any computer. PDF has become the standard method of transmitting graphics files (magazine ads, for instance—or whole magazines) from the people who produce the digital files to the people who will print them.

NEVER SCAN A PAPER RÉSUMÉ TO MAKE A PDF. There are two kinds of PDFs, and the difference can cause serious problems in business correspondence. Most people don’t seem to know the difference, and in fact there are no generally used names for them that I know of. I call them “native PDFs” and “scanned PDFs.”

“Native PDFs” are what people normally mean when they say “PDF”. They’re what you get when you create a document in, say, Microsoft Word, and then save it as a PDF. When you send a native PDF to someone else, they can select text in the PDF, and then copy it to another application. Sometimes it is important to be able to do this. (However, as I’ve noted above, résumé-processing software used by HR departments usually can’t process PDFs.)

“Scanned PDFs” are what you get when you take a piece of paper with print on it, and then put it through a scanner to be made into a PDF. The resulting file contains no text—just a picture of text. You can’t select the text and copy it. There is no useful way to extract the text from it. There are ways to optically scan the text (OCR scanning), but someone who was expecting a normal, native PDF isn’t going to bother about this. And an OCR scan of a scanned PDF will probably be pretty messy anyway.

Plain text is, along with Word, the most widely-used and versatile résumé format. Plain text is also known in the U.S. as ASCII (pronounced, if you’ll excuse me, “ass-key”). Plain-text résumés are far better than Word versions for copying into online forms.

Plain-text résumés can also be copied into the body of an e-mail. (Usually when you e-mail a résumé, you will be attaching the Word version of your résumé to the e-mail. Copying plain text into the e-mail is something different.)

I’ll send you two versions of your plain-text résumé. One is for pasting into on-line forms. The other, with fixed line-endings, is for pasting into the body of e-mails, which you should do only if specifically requested.

The versatility of plain text has its price: plain-text is plain text, with no visual formatting like boldface, italic, different type sizes, nice-looking fonts, etc. Résumés with such visual formatting are easier to read and more appealing than plain-text résumés. So résumés with visual formatting (normally produced with Word) are also standard job-hunting tools, either instead of, or in addition to, plain-text résumés. Word résumés are often requested by recruiters and HR departments; in a few industries, others in the hiring chain may prefer PDF résumés. (Word résumés are what you should always send unless you are specifically told that some other format is preferable.)

In plain-text documents, only a limited range of text characters can be used: the ASCII character set that is recognized by all computers and computer software in the U.S. Because they use only the ASCII character set, plain-text documents read the same everywhere: there is no character substitution. Many commonly-used characters are not part of the ASCII character set, and should not be used in plain-text documents (at least not in the U.S.). These include: accented letters, long dashes (en or em dashes), curly quotes, and automatic bullets. (The occasional bits of garbage you see in text on the Web or in e-mails may be caused by character substitution for unrecognized non-ASCII characters.)

If, for foreign languages, you need characters that are considered plain-text characters in the target country but not in the ASCII standard, I can send you a document with the proper encoding.

Terminology: ASCII versus plain-text, U.S. versus foreign. Increasingly often, plain-text documents are being referred to as “ASCII” documents in the résumé world. This is equally correct—in the United States. Except in rarefied technical circles, “ASCII” is a virtual synonym for “plain-text” in the U.S. (ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”, and the spec dates back to the 1960s.) ASCII documents also work just fine for documents in English sent to other countries, even though “plain-text” may mean something different there. ASCII, because it was the very first character encoding specified, is the lowest common denominator, recognized by computers and software around the world. Someday it will be replaced everywhere, probably by one of the current Unicode encodings. But that will not be soon.

NOTE: Crystal Résumés will provide the plain-text version of your résumé as a Microsoft Word document that is totally stripped of formatting. That’s because not all of my clients are familiar with handling .txt files. You can use it just like an ASCII .txt document.

If you prefer, I’ll send a .txt file—no extra trouble, no extra charge. Either way, the document will be strictly ASCII, using only the ASCII character set. In fact, whichever I send, I first prepare the text in a .txt document, using a text processor (BBEdit) and ASCII encoding. That makes it easy to verify that all characters are ASCII. I then paste the finished text into a Word document that is void of formatting at any level. (Except that a font is specified, as it must be, even in a text processor. Otherwise there would be no letters to read. The font spec is automatically stripped when you paste into another document. The formatting that causes problems is such things as boldface, italic, line spacing, automatic bullets, and, especially, the tables that so many people use for layout in Word.)

Use “résumé”, except in e-mails or text messages, where the accented characters might be converted into garbage characters on the recipient’s end. In those cases, use “resume.”

In fact, it is becoming increasingly safe to use accented characters (and many other special characters) in the body of an e-mail, and it is also becoming safer, though more slowly, to use them in e-mail addresses and subject lines. This may be true of text messages as well. But, for now, it’s probably still safest to avoid them in e-mails. In a few more years, this will perhaps no longer be an issue.

(Accented characters are not part of the ASCII character set that was for a long time the standard in the U.S. for plain-text documents like e-mails and text messages, so they sometimes get converted to other characters or combinations of characters. (See Plain Text, above.) But ASCII is gradually being replaced by the UTF-8 encoding, which does allow accented characters, as well as many other characters that were not part of the ASCII standard.)

But always use “résumé” when possible. The spelling “resume” is not well thought of in fields where language skills are valued. I don’t recommend that spelling for executives and professionals. (Except in e‑mails and texts.)

Another recognized spelling is “resumé.” A good theoretical case can be made for it, and I used it for some years. But it hasn’t caught on, so I bow to common usage.

(For the distinction between a résumé and a curriculum vitae, see Curriculum Vitae.)

RTF is not relevant to résumés anymore. It’s increasingly irrelevant to anything else. RTF was a Microsoft standard for exchanging text and (some) formatting between different word-processing applications, or different versions of Word. Microsoft stopped maintaining the standard in 2008, so it is not fully compatible with Word 2010 or later.

The history of RTF and résumés: Word documents created with versions older than Word 2007 were notorious carriers of “macro” viruses, and for that reason some employers used to request that résumés be sent in RTF format, rather than Word. With Word 2007, .docx became the standard format for Word documents, and .docx files can’t carry macro viruses. (But .doc files still can. And, in fact, so can files with the .rtf extension, if they have been renamed from .doc. And they can host other malware as well.)

Microsoft Word is the standard word processor in the business world, and the most widely-used word processor for home use. It’s the inescapable standard for résumés. But common technical issues send a surprising number of Word résumés to the trash before anyone at the employer’s end even sees them. The great majority of résumé professionals (who are now all “certified”) produce documents that are not fully compatible with résumé-processing technology, and often disastrously incompatible.

Recruiters and HR departments typically prefer Word résumés. Recruiters often need to re-format the résumés they receive, and are better able to do this with word-processor files. HR departments, especially at larger companies, often use “applicant-tracking systems” (ATSs) to process resumes, and word-processor résumés work better for this than PDFs. Plain-text documents are even easier to process for some purposes, including ATSs, but word-processors produce documents that are much more readable by humans than plain-text documents. When humans read dozens or hundreds of résumés, readability counts.

Of the résumé formats commonly used, Word produces the best-looking and most readable résumés. But the technologies widely used for automated résumé processing, and the fact that a résumé must be distributed widely to people who use different computer systems and different versions of Word, place rather narrow limits on what can be done in the way of making a Word résumé visually appealing.

Employers and recruiters often complain about Word features used in résumés that turn the text into garbage if it is viewed or handled with software other than Word—including the software in the automated “applicant tracking systems” that have become very widely used by employers and employment agencies.

The most common of these problems is Word tables, yet very many résumé professionals (including “certified” ones) use them proudly. Opened outside of Word, the information put in the tables will be scrambled and unreadable. If you see two or more columns of text in a résumé, it was probably done with tables or tabs—or with spaces, in which case the columns will look sloppy. Tabs are better than tables, but they’re still not good for making columns in a résumé. There’s no good way to make columns in a Word or plain-text résumé.

Some people even use tables for the entire résumé, instead of indents, to get more control over layout than Word’s automatic indents allow. That will cause the entire résumé to get scrambled. (There are safe ways to get fine control over indents in Word—but few Word users know them.)

Using “distinctive” fonts is another common problem. For font issues, very important for résumés, see Fonts for résumés. If it isn’t Times or Arial/Helvetica, there will probably be issues.

Tints and colors are another frequent problem, and a favorite with some résumé services. Tinted or colored areas either waste space between text, or if text is superimposed on them, the text may be difficult or impossible to read when actually printed out in black and white. (Employers don’t print résumés in color.)

Even Word’s automatic bulleted lists are a minor problem. Outside of Word, they show up as meaningless characters (like Σ). Virtually everyone uses them, but there are safer ways to do this job, that also look a lot better.

Another occasional issue is the special characters that Word, by default, substitutes for certain text you type. For instance, unless you tell Word not to, by changing the application preferences, when you type 1st you get the ‘st’ superscripted, and when you type 1/2 you get ½. Sometimes this can be handy, but when the document is opened outside of Word, as résumés often are, these characters show up as garbage code.

.docx, .doc., .docm, .dotx, and .dot are the various electronic formats (“file formats”) in which Word documents can be created. The names correspond to the extension in the filename—the part to the right of the dot. (If you can’t see the extension, there should be a setting in your operating system that can be changed to let you.)

.docx: The format your résumé should be in. The usual format for Word documents since Word 2007 (2008 for Mac).

.doc: The usual format for Word documents before Word 2007/2008. These .doc files were notorious carriers of macro viruses. Some employers wouldn’t accept .doc resumes for that reason, and asked for RTFs instead. But now that .docx is the normal format, RTFs are no longer a thing for résumés

Macro viruses, however, are still a problem. They began making a comeback around 2014. Macro viruses affect Macs as well as PCs. They can be carried by Excel documents as well as by Word. If you get a strange document that generates a message saying you must enable macros to open the document, don’t. It probably contains a macro virus. Microsoft Office users should keep macros disabled on all software that uses them. If you’re one of the few exceptions, you already know about macros.

.docm: Introduced in 2007/2008, this designates a Word document that has macros enabled. That means that it can carry macro viruses, and will not be welcomed by employers. It also means that macros are available for specialized uses, which normal Word users don’t need: see the historical background below.

More about macro viruses and Word—written in 2008 and now for the historically curious only.

Word has gone through many different versions in the years of its ubiquity, and many old versions are still in use by someone somewhere. Documents created with Word 2007 or later are identified by the .docx extension; special types have a .docm or .dotx extension. (See above.) Files created by earlier versions of Word are identified by the .doc extension. Word versions are typically named with the year they were issued (e.g., Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2007). The Mac versions are typically released the year after the corresponding Windows version, and their names reflect this: for instance, Word 2008 is the Mac version of Windows Word 2007.

Word 2007/2008 marked a major change in Word. From Word 97 through Word 2003, all versions of Word used the same basic file format. This means that documents created by one of these versions could generally be opened by any of the others. In Word 2007, the tool set remained much the same (except for macros, discussed below), but the interface was reorganized, and the file format and technical underpinnings are fundamentally different. (Microsoft, with its Ribbon, botched the interface badly, and has backtracked, pouting, in later versions.) Word 2007 and later versions can open documents created by pre-2007 versions. But documents saved in the standard native Word 2007+ format cannot be opened by earlier versions. (Standard Word 2007+ documents have the .docx extension.) It is possible to save a Word 2007+ file as a .doc file if you want.

Perhaps the most important change that came in with Word 2007 was the disabling of macros in Word’s standard tool set. This change had one huge advantage for everyone, and one huge disadvantage for an important but very small group of Word users. A Word document in which the macro capabilities have been disabled cannot carry the macro viruses that made Word infamous as an electronic disease carrier. Macros, however, are an extremely powerful tool, which is of critical importance for some Word users, especially in the business world. Microsoft has therefore included in Word 2007+ the option of enabling macros in a given document. Word 2007+ documents with macros enabled are saved with the .docm extension. These documents, like .doc files, can still carry macro viruses.

E-mail: info[at-sign]crystalresumes.com

Notary Sojac.

“To take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech.”

— Joseph Conrad (famous writer and literary stylist in English, who had previously worked his way up from steward to able seaman to ship’s captain, and moved from writing his native Polish, to French, to English), The Mirror of the Sea, ch. 2, sec. IV

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.… Besides, we may chance to hit upon some other obvious facts which may have been by no means obvious to Mr. Lestrade.”

— Samuel McChord Crothers, 1857 — 1927.
Unitarian minister, once nationally known and highly esteemed as a writer and lecturer; compared with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.