PDF or Word CV: which should you send to an ATS?

Just before you attach the file, there’s a moment of hesitation. Keep the Word document the CV was written in, or export it to PDF, as most advice suggests without always saying why.

No format is more ‘readable’ than another in itself

A Word file (.docx) is, technically, structured text from start to finish. A PDF can be exactly the same, or not at all, depending on how it was produced. What decides whether an applicant tracking system (ATS) can read it isn’t the file extension. It’s whether the text inside is real, selectable text, rather than an image that looks like text.

What makes a PDF reliable, or not

A PDF produced by a browser engine, as leading^.cv does with Chromium, keeps real text in the final file. But a PDF can also come from an image export: a scanned CV, a converted screenshot, a layout ‘flattened’ by some online tools. In that case there’s nothing left to extract, however much care went into the layout. The check is easy to do yourself: try selecting a sentence in the PDF with your mouse. If nothing selects, the ATS won’t read anything either.

What makes a Word file fragile

The risk with a .docx is different and more mundane, and most people have run into it without linking it to an ATS: the same Word file doesn’t always open the same way from one computer to the next. A missing font, a margin that shifts, a table that moves, and the layout shifts with it, with nothing you can do about it once the file has been sent.

The simple choice

A well-generated text PDF fixes the layout and the reading order, whatever device opens it. It’s the safest version to send by default. Word is still useful in one specific case: when a recruiter explicitly asks for an editable file, for instance to load it into their own applicant tracking tool. In the UK, recruitment agencies often ask for Word so they can reformat a CV before passing it on to a client. Without that explicit request, a text PDF is the format that leaves the least to chance.