PDF for recruiting and CVs
Roughly three quarters of CVs are filtered out before a person reads them — and the reasons are measurable.
What actually causes a CV to be dropped
An image-only PDF is the worst case. If the file is a picture of a CV with no text layer, the parser reads nothing at all and the application is empty.
Contact details placed in a header or footer are frequently not read, which means the candidate is filtered out for having no phone number they in fact provided.
Multi-column layouts get read as a single stream, so two columns interleave into nonsense. Tables and text boxes do the same.
Decorative fonts are misread, and exotic bullet characters become question marks or vanish.
Every one of those is something a machine can check, which is why it is worth checking before sending rather than wondering afterwards.
The tools for it
- Is my PDF scanned?Find out whether a PDF has real text or is just a picture of one — before you run OCR.
- Extract text from PDFTurn it into plain text with the lines and paragraphs intact.
- OCR PDFMake a scanned PDF searchable.
- PDF to WordGet editable paragraphs, headings, lists and images into a Word file — nothing uploaded.
- Flatten PDFBake form fields into the page so no one can change them.
What this does not do
We cannot tell you whether a specific employer system will accept a specific file. Applicant tracking systems differ, and none of them publish their parser.
What we can do is check the things that are known to break parsing, and tell you which ones your file has. A clean file is not a guarantee of getting through; a file with no text layer is close to a guarantee of not getting through.
We also do not judge the content. Whether the CV is any good is not something a tool should pretend to score.
In every case above, the document is processed without ever being transmitted. Nothing is uploaded, which for confidential filings, student records, unpublished manuscripts and salary data is not a convenience but the point.
Set it up for the whole team
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