I parsed the same resume six ways to settle "PDF or Word"

Muneeb Nawaz — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:18:34 +0000

Search "should I send my resume as PDF or Word" and you get a few hundred
articles that all say some version of the same thing. PDF is safer. Word is
safer. It depends on the company. Every one of them is somebody's view,
because answering the question properly means running both files through a
parser and reporting what came back, and almost nobody writing those articles
has a parser.

I had built one for something else. So I ran the file through it.

The setup

One resume. Same person, same words, same sections. Saved six ways, then put
through the same extraction and scored out of 98, where the score is how much
of the document survived into the structured record a recruiter actually
searches.

Saved as	Score	What it lost
Markdown	98	nothing
PDF	95	Missing links
OpenDocument	95	Missing links
Plain text	95	Missing links
Word	80	Page header, Missing links
Rich text	60	No work history section, Missing sections, Missing links

The question assumes the answer is in the left column. It is not.

The Word gap is not Word

Word scores 80 and PDF scores 95, and the entire 15 point difference is one
finding: page header.

The .docx in that table puts the name, email and phone number in the header
region, which is exactly where a Word template puts them. Plenty of parsers
discard the header before they start reading the body, on the reasonable
theory that headers contain page numbers and document titles rather than
content. So the contact details never arrive, and the record lands in the
system with nobody attached to it.

Move that one line into the body and the file is still a .docx. Nothing
about the container was ever the problem.

It runs the other way too, which is the part that settles it. A PDF laid out
in two columns scores 43. Being a PDF saved it from nothing, because the
extractor reads a two column layout in the order the text was drawn, not the
order a human reads it, and the job titles end up interleaved with the skills
list.

Rich text was the surprise

60 out of 98, and the reason is worth knowing whatever format you use.

That file marks its section headings by making the text bold. Not by
applying a heading style, just bolding the characters. A person reads bold as
a heading without thinking about it. A parser looks for a style, finds no
style, and cannot tell where the work history begins. Two findings, 26 percent
and 15 percent, from a formatting choice that looks identical on screen.

Bold is not a heading. In any format.

Markdown wins for a boring reason

Markdown is the only file that scored 98, and it is not because Markdown is
magic. It is the only one of the six carrying a portfolio URL written out in
full. The other three clean formats tie at 95 losing the same three points for
the link none of them has.

The format did not earn that. The content did. Which is the whole point.

Keeping the numbers honest

Every number above is recomputed from the actual fixture files on each test
run. The published evidence lives in a typed array, a test reads the six real
documents off disk, runs them through the same extraction the product uses,
and compares. Change a weight in the scorer and the test fails with the new
number in the assertion message.

it(`${row.file} still scores ${row.score}`, async () => {
  const extraction = await read(row.file);
  const score = scoreExtraction(extraction, recoverFields(extraction));
  expect(score.value, `${row.file} score moved`).toBe(row.score);
});

There is a second test that matters more than it looks. It asserts the six
files are the same resume, by comparing the name and email the parser
recovered from each. The first version compared word overlap and read 0.84
across the six, because Markdown carries a URL and its own syntax while plain
text carries neither. A threshold loose enough to pass that is loose enough to
pass a different resume by the same author, so it compares recovered fields
instead. If someone swaps a fixture, the scores stay plausible and the
sentence next to them quietly becomes a lie. That test is the thing standing
between this article and being wrong six months from now.

What to actually send

Send what the posting asks for. Somebody there knows what their system
accepts, and ignoring an explicit instruction is a worse risk than either
format.

Where nothing is specified, send a PDF exported from a word processor. Never
one scanned or exported as an image: that file has no text layer at all and
scores zero. Not a low score, nothing.

Then stop thinking about the format. Moving contact details out of a page
header was worth 15 points on this document. Choosing between PDF and Word,
with the layout already clean, was worth nothing at all. They tie.

The full write up, with the failure cases and the deduction table, is here:
PDF or Word? The same resume, parsed both
ways. The parser runs in the
browser, so if you want to try it on your own file, nothing gets uploaded.