Question about CVs and viewing them

Kyrae

Hiya! A while back the job centre put me in touch with a local company who update and redesign CVs for free, a charity sort of project. They made me a lovely new CV that looked a lot more professional than my old one, but when I recently opened it on my new laptop with different software I realised the formatting was all over the place!!

My question is to anyone who works in recruiting... what word processing software do you view CVs with? Also, does anyone know of a way to make sure that when i email CVs it will always look right, can i make it into a pdf file perhaps?

Any help or advice would be appreciated

rrf494g

file format is key
yes - it's the file format - so if you can get a good looking .pdf file, everybody will see it the same. There are also problems if the original was built on a mac computer, but you have moved it to a windows pc. In this case even the same file format may oddly "shift about".
regards

TwistedPsycho

This may also depend on the program its written on.

A .doc file (usually written in MS Word) can lose some formatting if opened in a different program such as Open Office.

DVardysShadow

With *.doc files, the formatting can go awry for the subtlest of reasons. A different version of the same font can put it out. Sometimes it seems that margins change or the paper size. For all of these reasons, I go with *.pdf.

Kaleidoscope27

I tend to write my CV in .doc then save it in .pdf for sending out. There's a MS Office add on you can download from MS's website so you can do this easily.

Kyrae

Thanks for all the help, sounds like PDF is the best option then!! What software should I write my CV in before converting it to PDF? My current CV looks fine in Word 2003 but I just tried converting it with an online PDF converter and it came out looking a mess with paragraphs and spacing changed

stinky_daddy

Kaleidoscope27 wrote: »

I tend to write my CV in .doc then save it in .pdf for sending out. There's a MS Office add on you can download from MS's website so you can do this easily.

I updated to Office 2007 recently, and, having just checked, it is easy to save a copy as a pdf file.

Open / create your cv as you would normally, when you are happy with it (including any formatting, fonts or spacing issues you might have), simply click on the 'Office Button' at the top left of the document, select 'save as' and then 'PDF or XPS' and the file will copy over into a pdf format, which, when opened should look exactly the same as when you created it.

HTH

S_D

Kyrae

Thank you for the help everyone! I recreated the CV in OpenOffice and made it into a PDF there rather than using Word, worked perfectly!

Savvy_Sue

Kyrae wrote: »

Thank you for the help everyone! I recreated the CV in OpenOffice and made it into a PDF there rather than using Word, worked perfectly!

Good plan: you will save the recruiters much stress. This morning was an absolute nightmare, with one form created on a Mac, another with a .docx extension which I initially tried to open on a computer without the converter software installed (which takes an age!), someone else attempting to fax a form in and so on, and so on and so on.

Anyone who has laid their application out correctly before converting to a pdf gets a gold star from me!