Is a 500K resume too big?

[Perseus]

So I have my resume set up (I designed it in Illustrator) and I have been trying to cut the file size down. I feel like I am being rejected because they don't want to look at a 500k resume!!! My Word version is 50k...I guess I am wondering how I can get that file size down! (I want it to be a pdf).

[Qion]

500k is actually very small. Unless your future employer runs on 20 year old computers, you'll be fine.

[lurk]

One thing to keep in mind is that if you are applying to larger companies a secretary will just OCR the resume and then throw the original away. So a fancy resume might be a liabillity since it won't scan well.

[Mikuro]

That's not really an issue when dealing with PDFs, though.

How are you creating this PDF? Have you tried using the "Compress PDF" option in OS X's Print dialog? Have you tried any of these apps?

[fryke]

He's talking Illustrator which has integrated, good, PDF support... Just have to make sure you don't keep editability of the file, then they get muuuuuuuch smaller. (PDF is both an export format and the default file format for Adobe Illustrator nowadays, but there are big differences between PDFs Illustrator can actually _work_ with and PDFs only intended for viewing.)

[lurk]

Originally Posted by Mikuro

That's not really an issue when dealing with PDFs, though.

Ha Ha, If you only knew. There were a number of large technology companies I was familiar with where they have a secretary whose job it is to print out PDF and Word resumes and then scan them in to get the data via OCR. Yes, it is that tortured. But it gets them a keyword searchable version that they can use in a standard way. That is important when you think that they get thousands of applications.

The other little secret is that often it was a good idea if you could get your paper resume into the hands of a hiring manager by circumventing the system. Then you would have a better chance, but it is not an easy trick.

Good Luck!

[fryke]

And no-one told them to just _select_ the text with the right tool and copy/paste? (Them being those secretaries you mention...)

[lurk]

Nope, because it doesn't work. Now acrobat (this is windows) has gotten better in this respect over the years but if your PDF had any sort of kerning done with the text Acrobat would get the word breaks wrong. The cut-text algorithm was based on the assumption that words were dropped in, well, word sized chunks. (I say was since I have not used acrobat for awhile and things might have changed.) A paragraph typeset by something like TeX would typeset things a letter at a time to do kerning and also to slightly adjust the kerning to optimize the white space when justifying a given line. It typesets beautifully, but can really throw off an algorithm making the assumption that the pdf came from Microsoft Word.

Also if you think back, it wasn't many years ago that you could not make any electronic submission. Then when they started taking them they had to deal with Word, Word Perfect, RTF, Postscript and whatnot (I distinctly remember that PDF was not an option for the first electronic resume I submitted, I used Postscript). The secretary printing and OCRing them approach probably made a lot of sense at the time. Also you cannot assume that the application was something that could be copied into, I would not be surprised if it was basically a black box.

The reasons for doing lots of things have been lost in the not so distant past. It is not always the case that the people doing something which looks like it has an easier approach today are sticking with their old stuff because they are just stupid. It could just be that it is cheeper to keep paying for the labor and toner than to buy a new system and retrain all the other employes.

Legacy systems are funny that way.