I prepared my CV in LaTeX and exported it to PDF. How to deal with a recruiter who insists on CV in Word format? Ask Question

FOREWORD

I prefer to create documents in formats such as LaTeX, Markdown or RMarkdown. They're platform and version (of the particular editor) independent. You can export them to good looking PDF that is (I think) de facto standard for the CV.

Unfortunately some recruiters force to "provide them an editable CV" which almost each time means a Word file. Obviously I could send them .tex file, but many of them are not familiar with such formats.

QUESTIONS

1. How to deal with such requests? I'm not very comfortable with that they're going to edit information contained in my CV. Wouldn't it be not more correct to offer them amended version of the CV myself (for example address removed)?
2. Regardless of my preferred formats / open standards, creating good looking CV in .docx, requires a license of MS Word. Obviously there're other tools (LibreOffice, Google Docs) that provides capabilities to export the result to MS Word. Even LaTeX could be converted to such format. Unfortunately, in many cases the output does not look good. According to this, could recruiter demand obtaining MS Word license?

I'm in the same situation - my CV is in LaTeX and I produce a PDF file for my CV.

When recruiters ask for a Word file, I tell them that I cannot do that, because I don't own a copy of Word, or a computer which will run Word.

Assuming by "recruiters" you mean recruitment agencies:

The companies that you are applying to don't care that your CV is PDF instead of Word, it's only the recruitment companies in the middle, and unless you're fresh out of education with no experience, they'll try and accommodate you because that's their job; there will be other recruitment agencies trying to fill the same positions that they are competing with.

What I do instead, is offer an alternative PDF version that has my contact details removed from it - it's easy to build this from the same LaTeX source. Sometimes this is good enough for them, other times they copy and paste the contents of my CV into a Word document themselves.