PDF or Word: which resume file to send
The default is easy. What is worth knowing is the short list of times the default is wrong.
Send a PDF. That is the answer nine times out of ten, and the reasoning takes one paragraph.
A .docx is a set of instructions for rebuilding a document, and the rebuilding depends on the machine doing it. Fonts you have and the reader does not get substituted. Spacing shifts. A layout that fit one page on your screen runs onto a second on theirs, orphaning a single line of a job you held for four years. A PDF carries its own fonts and fixed positions, so what you approved is what arrives.
The interesting part is the other one time in ten.
When Word is the right answer
The posting asks for it. Some application forms accept .doc and .docx only. This is usually an older system, and arguing with it costs you the application. Send what it asks for.
A recruitment agency asked. Agencies routinely reformat candidate resumes onto their own letterhead before sending them to the client, often removing your direct contact details in the process so the client cannot go around them. They need an editable file to do it. You can dislike the practice; it is still the fastest route into that particular client.
An internal referral is passing it along. Someone forwarding your resume inside their company may want to adjust a heading or add a note. Make that easy for them.
The employer is a small organisation without a careers portal. A charity, a clinic, a two-person agency. Here your file lands in a mail client and is opened by a person, and either format works — but a .docx is less likely to trip an aggressive attachment filter than a PDF from an unknown sender.
Outside those four, PDF.
What actually goes wrong, in each direction
The advice to avoid PDFs is not invented. It is out of date.
Older applicant tracking systems genuinely struggled with PDF text extraction, and that reputation has outlived the problem by about a decade. Current systems handle a text-based PDF without difficulty. The caveat in that sentence is doing all the work.
A text-based PDF contains the characters as characters. Select the text in your reader; if it highlights word by word, it is text, and any parser can read it.
An image-based PDF contains a picture of the characters. Nothing can read it without OCR, and most systems will not try. You get this by scanning a printed copy, by exporting from a design tool with “outline text” enabled, or occasionally from a phone scanning app. It is the single worst thing you can send, and it looks perfect on your screen — which is why people send it.
Word files fail differently. They rarely become unreadable; they become different. The two-column layout you built with a table reflows. The header containing your phone number is skipped by the parser, as headers frequently are. The font falls back and your careful one-page fit becomes one and a bit.
How to check which one you have
Open your PDF, select all, and copy. Paste it somewhere with no formatting.
If you get your resume as text, it is text-based and you are fine. If you get nothing, it is an image. This is the same thirty-second check described in how to check if your resume is ATS-friendly, and it settles the format question at the same time as the layout one.
Things that do not matter
The file size, within reason. A text-based resume PDF is tens of kilobytes. If yours is several megabytes, something is embedding an image, which is worth investigating for the reason above — but nobody is rejecting you over kilobytes.
The filename, mostly. Adam-Whitcombe-Resume.pdf is better than resume-final-v4-USE-THIS.pdf because a human will see it in a folder of forty files, not because a system scores it. Use your name. Move on.
“Print to PDF” versus “Export as PDF”. Both produce text-based files from an ordinary document editor. The distinction only matters when the source was already an image.
What this site produces
The builder here generates the PDF directly rather than printing a rendered page, so the output is text-based by construction and the fonts are embedded. You can verify that claim with the copy-paste test above, or by running the downloaded file through the ATS resume checker, which parses it with the same library the checker uses on any other file.
If you need a .docx for one of the four situations above, the honest answer is that this site does not produce one yet. Open the PDF in Word or Google Docs, check that the structure survived, and send that.