In his 2007 Resume Sourcing Survey, "Searchologist" Jim Stroud identifies some of the most commonly posted file formats, and also some discoveries that may go against popular conventions. Following is an excerpt.

So there I was about to perform my 386,542nd search for a passive candidate (more or less) when a question occurred to me. How many resumes are there on the Internet and what percentage of those resumes is relevant to my search? Not knowing the answer to this, I began searching for the information. When I could not find what I was looking for, I decided to create my own.

So, what is The 2007 Resume Sourcing Survey?
It is a random sampling of online resume searches performed on Live, Google and Yahoo for the purpose of discerning which search engine has catalogued the most resumes.

Why Live, Google and Yahoo? There are hundreds of search engines on the market, but Google, Yahoo and Live are the most popular.

How did I qualify the data?
I used very simple search strings that work on each engine with only the slightest variations added to alleviate search result noise. (I define “search result noise” as unwanted results returned from my query.) For example, here is how I searched for the resumes of software engineers on Google, Live and Yahoo with the qualifier being that the document’s extension be PDF.

So, what did I find out?
I found out a lot more than I intended when I began this project. My initial focus was to only concentrate on Software Engineers, but I later decided to include data on industries outside of Information Technology as well. I also began to wonder what formats were most popular, which top-level-domains held the most resumes (.com? or .net?) and just how significant were lesser-known domains (i.e., .cc, .biz) for resume sourcing, and so on. Once I began the survey, it took on a life of its own.

• Technical resumes were not the most populated resumes online
• There are many filetypes I have overlooked (like “.PHP) in the past that I will no longer ignore
• Yahoo has the biggest index of resumes over Google and Live
• Live outperformed Google and Yahoo on certain types of industry resumes

1. HTML
2. HTM
3. PDF
4. DOC