PDF or DOCX?

The short answer is PDF, unless the application form asks for something else. The long answer is that the format matters far less than whether the text inside it is real.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

The one test that matters

Open your resume. Try to select a sentence with your cursor and copy it. Paste it somewhere.

If nothing highlights, or you paste nothing, your resume contains no text at all. It is a picture of a resume. No parser can read it, no keyword can match, and no score is meaningful. This happens to anyone who scanned a printout, exported from a design tool at the wrong setting, or saved from a screenshot.

This is the single most catastrophic and most invisible problem in resume formatting, and it takes ten seconds to rule out.

When PDF wins

It preserves your layout exactly, so what a human opens is what you designed. Modern parsers handle it consistently. It cannot be accidentally edited in transit.

Send PDF by default. Export from your editor rather than printing to PDF where you have the choice, since the export path more reliably keeps the text layer intact.

When DOCX wins

When the application form explicitly asks for it. Some older systems and some recruitment agencies still prefer it, and a few will reject a PDF outright.

Recruiters who reformat resumes onto their own letterhead also prefer DOCX, because it saves them retyping. If you are working through an agency, ask.

What not to send

.pages — most systems cannot open it at all.

.odt — inconsistent support, no upside.

.txt — parses perfectly and looks like you gave up.

A link to a Google Doc — permissions fail, and it puts an extra step between a recruiter and your experience.

An encrypted or password-protected PDF — cannot be parsed at all. If you protected the file at any point, export a clean copy.

Name the file properly

Jane-Okafor-Product-Manager.pdf. Not resume-final-v4-USE-THIS-ONE.pdf.

It costs nothing, it is the first thing a human sees, and it is what your file will be called in a folder of four hundred others.