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Legal Recruitment Agencies and PDF Files - avoid the latter!

We have recently had about 30% of all CVs sent in by candidates in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. Please think twice before converting your CV and sending it in this format. It drives us insane!

Adobe appears to be one of the most unstable platforms around and crashes our computers when it clashes with Firefox and Windows Explorer and anything else thrown into its' path.

I know that some law firms ask for CVs in pdf format - simply because it makes it easier to read and reduces the risk of viruses, which Microsoft Office appears to be highly susceptible to.

However, as a legal recruitment agency who invested in technology some time ago to enable automated upload of CVs onto our system quickly and efficiently, .pdf files are the bane of our life!

Every time one gets sent, we have to reformat it into a word document, and if we want to use it to send out (*with your consent of course), we have to remove all the text boxes that our specialist converter software throws into the mix for us. This can take anything from 5 to 20 minutes.

Legal recruitment consultants have enough to do at the moment with the constant bombardment of CVs and telephone calls from candidates - the market is still not booming unfortunately - and converting pdf files is not one of our priorities...

I know they look good, and to be honest if I was sending out my own CV I may consider pdf files, but it does not really assist your application.

Please think twice before sending them. I may be slightly crotchety when writing this after just converting 11 CVs in a row!

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment - Online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals. Visit our Website to search or download our Vacancy Database or view our Candidate Database online.

Our Legal Careers Shop has eBooks on CV Writing for Lawyers, Legal Job Interview Guide, Interview Answers for Lawyers, NQ Career Guide, Guide to Finding Work Experience or a Training Contract and the Entrants Guide to the Legal Profession. To visit our Sale/Clearance section please click here.

www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop

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