Got an email from an agent yesterday

[courtg9000]

It dosen't happen very often these days but I get the odd one every now and again.
Quite a wide keyword search too as they admitted in the email that this is what they had done.

What flabbergasted me was this: "Send me a CV in Word 2013 format with no headers, footers, tables or text boxes and no red lines under any spellings as we cannot accept them"

So it seems to me that unless they have a very wide and varied custom Word dictionary that even on the last one pretty much every CV will fail.
Is this is acommon thing now?

[OwlHoot]

Ask the agent if it would be OK to post them a stack of punched cards with your CV on them in ASCII

[BR14]

Ask the agent if it would be OK to post them a stack of punched cards with your CV on them in ASCII

or EBCDIC? perhaps?

[Paddy]

It dosen't happen very often these days but I get the odd one every now and again.
Quite a wide keyword search too as they admitted in the email that this is what they had done.

What flabbergasted me was this: "Send me a CV in Word 2013 format with no headers, footers, tables or text boxes and no red lines under any spellings as we cannot accept them"

So it seems to me that unless they have a very wide and varied custom Word dictionary that even on the last one pretty much every CV will fail.
Is this is acommon thing now?

I used to send my CV with key words in white test in the spaces. The agent's retirements would match each time and guaranteed to get short listed.

[Mordac]

I used to send my CV with key words in white test in the spaces. The agent's retirements would match each time and guaranteed to get short listed.

Only if the agent's spelling was as sh!t as yours...

[ladymuck]

That seems like a very peculiar set of requirements, especially the version of Word. That would exclude people who use OpenOffice or Google Docs, or whatever Mac users use? If you're on a later version of Office you can't save down to 2013, your option is to save down to 97-2003. (I know that 2013 is compatible with later versions but I wonder if the sender knows that)

Encouraging people to check their spelling is fine but, as you say, unless they have every known word in their dictionary it's going to have a squiggle or two.

Sounds to me like that email was written by a total numpty. Oh, yes, it was an agent.

[courtg9000]

That seems like a very peculiar set of requirements, especially the version of Word. That would exclude people who use OpenOffice or Google Docs, or whatever Mac users use? If you're on a later version of Office you can't save down to 2013, your option is to save down to 97-2003. (I know that 2013 is compatible with later versions but I wonder if the sender knows that)

Encouraging people to check their spelling is fine but, as you say, unless they have every known word in their dictionary it's going to have a squiggle or two.

Sounds to me like that email was written by a total numpty. Oh, yes, it was an agent.

The whole thing struck me as rather weird.
My CV is only available to recruiters as a PDF anyway, after an incident a while back.

[ladymuck]

The whole thing struck me as rather weird.
My CV is only available to recruiters as a PDF anyway, after an incident a while back.

It's totally the sort of email/agent I'd want to have some fun with if I were bored enough.

[TwoWolves]

They have some tool to load it into a database, sounds like it was written some time ago. There's no job, they are going to sell on your details.

[courtg9000]

They have some tool to load it into a database, sounds like it was written some time ago. There's no job, they are going to sell on your details.

It doesn't matter - the job was not a fit. At £250/ day inside - yeah right. Oh and I retired nearly a year ago!