I have received this request and responded without MS software. For Mac you have the great NeoOffice and for PC and *nix you have Suns’ OpenOffice, both of which are free OSS Software.

FYI,both the PC and Mac versions handle the Excel spreadsheet as per the request of the recruitment agency.

I checked by e-mail, in person and by phone that it was received correctly and there was no problem at all. My resume was forwarded in *.doc, *.pdf and *.odf and they could read all of them. I did them on a Mac Mini and an XP PC and they were transparent to the receivers.

What they can’t handle at the agency are *.pages files from iWork. Also it’s worth noting that TextEdit in Leopard on the Mac can handle *doc and *.docx (Office 2007/8), so on a Mac you only would have needed NeoOffice.

Later I received MS Office 2008 for Mac as a freebee for attending an MS event in Sydney. I checked it in Word 2008 and the NeoOffice exported spreadsheet in Excel and they were both absolutely fine.

So even a school leaver or un-employed person, using NeoOffice could have responded. Most companies in Australia deal in using MS software, so having something like Open/StarOffice around is a god send - you just have to go outside of the software you are given with your computer.

Success to those in Australia who have applied and a huge hello to those employed in other countries by Apple.

The reason Word and Excel are preferred to any given agency is that most, if not all CRM software packages are designed for a Windows environment, and thus recruitment agencies use PCs as their hardware - so Word & Excel come hand-in-hand with that platform. It is also the most common format for CVs and other home-user data, thus it makes economic sense. It would be backward to do it any other way! I do understand though, that the most common form of CV in this particular instance, most assuredly should NOT be Word/Excel.

There is no reason a company should have to purchase an entirely new IT platform (in the form of Apple) to service the short-term needs of one individual client. Can you also not see the conflict in purchasing products from the client, to service the client? It makes the contract kind of moot.

I will concede, that any self-respecting recruitment agency should be able to handle getting a CV in any format, be it Windows or Mac based. Converstion software is not expensive.

One final note: 98.4% of prospective candidates already have a job before seeking a new role. It is rare to have a candidate appear that is looking for a role after being previously unemployed.

In my dictionary ‘cretin’ is defined as ‘recruitment consultant’.