[LRUG] Expat thinking of coming home

[Paul Robinson]

On 17 Sep 2012, at 10:11, Chris Mear <chrismear at gmail.com> wrote:

> From my conversations with recruiters, the reason Word format is asked for is because it's editable (as opposed to something less easily editable, such as PDF). This is so they can remove your contact details and add their own header, thus making sure any communication goes through them.


This is bang-on the reason why they want it in Word format - which raises the question what value are they actually adding to a process where they must enforce a man-in-the-middle attack to negotiations?


> So I'm sure plain text would be fine.



Not quite. Some recruiters will consider such a format to be "unprofessional" in its presentation to employers.

So, rather than add value themselves by spending 5 minutes copying/pasting it into Word, making it look nice and then submitting it, they require the candidate does this first. Word Doc is the best format for them.

They won't do it themselves, because they might handle many dozens of CVs a day, and don't want to have to do this with all of them. 

Remember, they are commission-based, and there's only so much work they are prepared to do to secure the right candidate and take 10%-20% of the first year's salary on a £50k-£70k job. I mean, would you reformat a CV for £14,000? I know that's too much work to ask me to do for that kind of money! I'm sure there's other areas where the recruiter is really adding far more value and where their time is best spent... </sarcasm>

Paul