This question comes up constantly, and the honest answer is a little unsatisfying: it depends on which applicant tracking system is on the other end, and you almost never get to know that in advance. But there's still a sensible default, and a specific exception worth knowing.
Why this is even a question
Older or less common applicant tracking systems have historically been better at reliably extracting text from .docx files than from PDFs — Word's format is a fairly standard, well-documented XML structure under the hood, while PDF is, by design, primarily a visual format (it describes how a page should look when rendered, not necessarily how its content is structured). A PDF built by a design tool that draws text as individual positioned characters, rather than proper flowing paragraphs, can genuinely be harder for some parsers to extract cleanly than the equivalent Word document.
That said, this gap has narrowed a lot. Most current, actively maintained ATS platforms handle a well-structured, text-based PDF just fine — the kind produced by a résumé builder, Word's own "Save as PDF," or Google Docs, rather than a scanned image saved as a PDF.
The practical default
Unless the job posting says otherwise, PDF is the safer general-purpose choice, for a reason that has nothing to do with ATS parsing: PDF guarantees your formatting looks the same on every device and every version of every viewer. A Word document can shift its layout depending on the reader's installed fonts, Word version, or OS — occasionally in ways that look genuinely broken. A PDF looks exactly like what you designed, every time, for the human who eventually opens it.
The exception: follow the posting
If a job listing explicitly asks for a specific format — "submit as .docx," or "PDF only" — that instruction exists because someone on the other end knows their own system's quirks better than any general advice can account for. Following it exactly is a much stronger signal than guessing based on general best practice. If no format is specified, PDF is the reasonable default; if a submission gets rejected or seems to go nowhere and you suspect a parsing issue, trying the alternate format is a reasonable next step.
Either way, keep the underlying structure the same
The format you export to matters less than the document's actual structure — single column, real text (not text-in-an-image), standard section headings. A well-structured resume parses fine as either PDF or Word; a poorly structured one (multi-column, graphics-heavy, tables) will cause the same parsing problems in both formats, just in slightly different ways.
Getting both without rebuilding anything
Our Resume Builder generates both from the same data — fill in your details once, and download as PDF, Word, or both, so you're covered either way a posting asks for it, without maintaining two separate documents by hand.
Try it here: Resume Builder.