- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Context: Searching for a new senior level software development job over a 9 week period in summer 2025.
- Focused mostly on data engineering and backend roles that are in-person or hybrid in the SF Bay Area.
- Leads from recruiters on LinkedIn were much more likely to lead to interviews+offers.
- The winning offer came through my personal network.
- I mostly used Hiring.cafe for prospecting. They’re a scraper with an interface I didn’t hate.
PDF is a typesetting format. Behind the scenes, every letter is placed on the page at a specific x,y coordinate. parsing text out of a pdf is essentially a series of guesses. sometimes the algorithm guesses wrong. PDF was invented for perfect layouts for printing.
Word docs are a text-based format. It’s very easy to correctly pull text from a Word doc.
Why risk an ai parsing a pdf incorrectly? There is no upside.
A word document converted to a PDF maintains the text content. A tagged PDF has the same (plus accessibility to screen readers).