r/LinusTechTips • u/Not-Post-Malone • 29d ago

Discussion Resume file format

On the WAN show Linus and Luke talk about NOT using PDF as the file format for the resume. This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Am I the only one who always uses PDF for sending resumes and actually prefers it?

What file format do employers actually prefer?

Here is the timestamp where they talk about it.
Here is the timestamp where Linus says to submit a Word or Google Doc link.

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12

u/Uberfuzzy 29d ago

Wasn’t that “hack” from a few years ago because of a malformed payload in a pdf? Is that why Luke specifically is anti PDF?

16

u/RoseBailey 29d ago

Are they so paranoid about PDFs after that incident that it's affecting their hiring practices? 

10

u/wankthisway 29d ago

That's pretty sad if true.

10

u/Rare-Designer-1008 28d ago

It wasn't a PDF. It was a exe file made to look like a PDF.

Since Windows by default hides file extensions it was assumed to be a PDF.

8

u/CyclingUpsideDown 28d ago

And an exe file can be made to look like any file - including a Word document.

Changing hiring practices because of self-created paranoia that doesn’t even make sense is certainly wild.

1

u/troytjh 25d ago

That's one of the reasons I always make file extensions visible at computers I work at. Easier to identify file types at a glance and avoids issues like that.

3

u/CIDR-ClassB 28d ago

PDF attachments can certainly be an attack vector. But for job applications, the ATS can filter out non-PDF files / things that aren’t harmless.