Home › PDF or Word for a resume?

PDF or Word for a resume?

Short answer: either, as long as it contains real text. If the posting names a format, use that. If it doesn’t, send a text-based PDF. The format that gets people filtered out isn’t PDF or Word. It’s a PDF that is secretly a picture.

The real risk: image-only PDFs

A PDF can hold text, or it can hold a photograph of text. They look identical on screen. To an applicant tracking system the second kind is an empty page: no name, no experience, no keywords. It happens when a resume is scanned from paper, photographed with a phone, or exported from some design tools with text converted to shapes.

Test yours: open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor, or press Ctrl/Cmd+F and search for your own name. If you can’t, the ATS can’t. Or drop it into our checker: an unreadable file scores 0 with the message “A machine can’t read this file.”

Test whether my resume is readable

When PDF is the better choice

• Your layout, fonts and spacing look the same on every device.
• Nobody can accidentally edit it, and tracked changes or comments can’t leak.
• Every modern ATS (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo) reads text-based PDFs.

When Word (.docx) is the better choice

• The posting or the recruiter asks for it. Staffing agencies often do, because they add their own cover sheet.
• You’re applying through an older or in-house system and want the safest possible parse.
• Use .docx, not the old .doc format, and avoid text boxes and tables either way.

How to export a PDF an ATS can read

• Word: File → Save As → PDF. Not “Print to PDF” via a scanner driver.
• Google Docs: File → Download → PDF document.
• Canva, Figma and other design tools: choose “PDF Standard” rather than “PDF Print” with flattening, then run the cursor test above. Multi-column templates from these tools often parse out of order even when the text is real.

Questions