PDF or Word: which should you send?

Send a PDF, unless the posting or the portal asks for something else. That is the same answer most guides give, and the reason usually given for it is wrong — PDFs are not inherently easier to parse, and modern applicant tracking systems read .docx perfectly well. The real reason is narrower and more useful.

The actual difference

A PDF is a fixed rendering. It stores the glyphs and where they go, so every program that opens it sees the same page. A .docx is a set of instructions to be re-laid-out by whatever opens it, using whatever fonts that machine has. Open your resume in Word on Windows, Pages on a Mac, Google Docs and LibreOffice and you can get four different line-break patterns — and, if a font is missing, four different fonts.

So the choice is really: do you want to be certain what the recruiter sees, or do you want the file to be editable by them? For a job application the first is almost always what you want. The one case where the second wins is a recruiting agency that intends to tweak your resume before forwarding it — and they will tell you.

Where the “PDFs don’t parse” myth comes from

Two real things got generalised into a rule:

• Image PDFs. A scan, a phone photo, or a design tool export set to rasterize produces a PDF with no text layer at all. Extraction returns nothing. This is a total failure and it is genuinely common — and it is the reason a blanket “PDFs are risky” sounds true to anyone who has seen one.
• Very old systems. Some legacy portals from the 2000s did handle PDFs badly. If a job portal in 2026 only accepts .doc, that is a signal about the employer, and you should send what it asks for anyway.

Neither is an argument against a text-based PDF, which is what any reasonable builder or word processor produces by default.

How to tell which kind of PDF you have

Open it and try to select a line of text with your cursor. If you can select it, there is a text layer. If the cursor turns into a crosshair or selects a whole rectangle, it is an image and no parser will read a word of it. Copy a paragraph and paste it into a plain text editor — that is approximately what the parser gets, and it takes ten seconds.

Format rules that matter more than the extension

• No text in headers or footers. Many parsers skip them entirely. A phone number in a footer can simply not exist as far as the system is concerned.
• No text boxes and no tables used for layout. This is the biggest .docx-specific trap: a two-column table interleaves cell by cell when extracted.
• One file, sensibly named. priya-raghunathan-resume.pdf. Some portals show the filename to the recruiter; none of them are impressed by resume_final_v3(1).pdf.
• Keep it under about 1 MB. Large files are usually large because of an embedded image, and an embedded photo is worth having only when the market you are applying into expects one.
• Do not password-protect or restrict it. An encrypted PDF cannot be parsed, and permission flags that block extraction do exactly what they say.

If the portal asks you to paste plain text

Some do, and it is the format that removes every question about parsing. Paste it, then fix what the paste broke: bullet characters usually survive as • or turn into stray symbols, and multi-column content arrives interleaved. Read it back before submitting — the plain-text box is what the recruiter will search, so it is worth two minutes.

The short answer

PDF, text-based, no headers or footers, no layout tables, under 1 MB. Send .docx when the posting says so, and when you do, keep the layout simple enough that re-flowing it on another machine cannot break it. Then check the extraction rather than the appearance — that is the only step that tells you which of the two files you actually have.