Using MS Word for your resume? Hmmm..

Microsoft software on the desktop happens to throw up surprises every second week. Some are pleasant ones that that improve your productivity and leave you thanking Microsoft for the genius product. Some, as you might has guessed it, are not so pleasant and leave you clueless, angry and frustrated.

If one has been in the workplace for too long, (as i found out lately) one cannot get all the resume items in one go. So you write down your first project details, then think about what did you fiddle with and then update your resume. After 4 years of dabbling around i had a lot of ego-enhancing resume items to show-off. It took me around 2 weeks to finally get my resume into some shape. As you see, I ending up having a lot of resume modifications and my word based resume blotted to 200KB+. Impervious to the memory efficiency of Word, I also modified my resume summary to fit the job descriptions, every time I applied. A usual practice followed by the sensible job seekers to avoid one's resume being unknowingly modified by the ever eager consultancies.

So what did MS Word do?

It recorded all the changes that had gone into my resume from the time the document was created. No wonder the document a reflected 200KB size. With this heavy resume of mine, I applied to a job that I considered to be a 100% match for my skills. But, I got a blunt rejection from a company who were armed with a fake resume tracking tool that read back all the previous MS Word resume versions. Thanks to the recording function of MS Word, the company considered my resume to be a falsely modified resume just to suit their requirements. Nice tool and an even better MS Word.

Wonder why Word keeps all the records even if Undo function doesn't work after you save and close a Word document? I wasn't even aware of the fact that Microsoft keeps a track of all the changes that you ever make to a word document.

But a nice work around exists for such unpleasant behaviors. Copy your entire resume and paste it into a new word document you are about to apply with. When i did this, my resume size scaled down to 74KB from 200KB.

Hope this post helps some honest soul.