In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF?
The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.
Having read a lot of CV's myself, recuiters will still edit PDFs.
Subtle formatting errors make it apparent when recruiters have reordered lists or inserted bullet-points here and there.
They'll try to cover contact details with white rectangles - infamously not great at removing data in a digital document.
Even when it it's not clear from the document itself, I like it when candidates come in with their own copy of the CV, I'm always interested in comparing the difference between that and the one the recruiter provided.
I have to say that it pretty much doesn't matter anymore.
In the last ~4 years I've only sent out PDF copies of my Resume to Recruiters.
A couple of have turned around and asked for it in DOC/DOCX, but a whole bunch more have just copy/pasted it into their own template and sent that to the employer.
I've turned up to interviews and offered the interviewers copies of my resume, and they wave something with the recruiters's logo all over it and not looking at all like what I sent in.
Exactly this. As someone on the hiring side, most Resumes that come my way are identical layout for every candidate a recruiter sends.
As soon as I'm talking to a candidate 1-on-1 (without the recruiter proxying) I ask them to provided me an original copy of their Resume, because the recruiter may have left out important details (thinking them irrelevant, as recruiters typically aren't tech-savvy) when copy+pasting into their template.
Just a note to anyone considering using PDFs for their CVs. Plenty of companies use Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) to manage recruitment process. Most often keywords are extracted from the CVs. PDFs are harder to extract from meaning you might not even be considered (or even ever seen) by a recruiter due to a far from perfect implementation. Of course the case here is different all together but maybe this insight will save someone's a fair bit of frustration.
On the other hand, I've seen companies where the ATS is able to perfectly extract information from a PDF resume, and I'm always quite impressed by that.
Recruiters routinely & legitimately edit CVs to remove your identifying information when they send your profile over to clients to prevent them from bypassing the recruiter.
You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.
But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR. Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes (which still do happen, also with standardfonts).
Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.
I just went through a round of job hunting and got plenty of private sector responses using a latex-made PDF. My resume is really not obvious that it was made in latex though.
I've gotten my last four jobs with a LaTeX made PDF and plenty of other offers.
I had a couple of recruiters ask for a doc/docx. I think I only made one conversion where it was the actual HR from the company using it for keyword matching and I refused to do it for the other recruiters. Still got invited to interviews of companies for those other recruiters.
Intermediary recruiters are well-known for asking for editable formats, e.g. docx. So technically you can stop them from editing your CV, but non-technically they can just decline to represent/use you. Or, they might just copy-paste your PDF into a new doc and present that to the potential employer.
If they come to me with a vague offer they can get my LinkedIn URL, and if they can't work with that, or really need a .doc then the conversation is mostly over for me.
It might seem harsh, but it's an easy way to weed out lazy recruiters that just want to spam your C.V. to many clients based on a keyword match when they upload it into their automated system and the recruiters that want to take time and even invest into a relationship to build a decent portfolio.
The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.