I always ask a recruiter to send me a copy of what they sent the company so I would know what they've seen. Recruiters will polish/edit resumes to fit the job being offered. If they start making things up, time to stop working with that recruiter.

@WesleyLong. Noted. If/when I ever have to deal with a recruiter with such a strange request, I'll ask for a copy of what they sent to ensure the recruiter doesn't change much more than my contact info.

From the opposite direction, I seldom see anyone requesting a resume in PDF form.

Most professional PDF editing programs (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Pro) allow editing PDFs to remove said information. The fact that their company chose not to spring for such a program, which is quite useful for many departments in a company to use, speaks a lot.

@gparyani - It's a hell of a lot easier just to ask the candidate to send you the original soft copy than to fuff around with software

@Davidw Out of curiosity, what format do you typically see requested?

Word format, if anything specific.

They often curate it to remove/reorder content to best highlight your strengths/history relevant to the particular role.

If the recruiter needs to hide candidate details from their client companies, they need to find new client companies. At the latest after a phone screen, the company can ask candidates for their contact information, tell the recruiter they didn't like the candidates, and still hire the candidates. Removing that information from the resume just delays that.

@Richard By "soft copy", I presume you mean the TeX source code I've used to typeset the document? Not sure that would be very useful.

@WesleyLong I had that happen to me once, and it was once too often... three hour train ride to New York City, stressful navigation of subways due to me missing a stop, three hours back... and I only had a half day's interview with no lunch because that was when they started asking about specific technologies I'd never heard of and I asked to see the resume they had. Indeed, never worked with that agency again.

@ojs - have you ever tried copy/pasting a formatted document from PDF to Word? It always seems like it will be a quick task, at first... (see meme)

@ashleedawg enough that I now remember "paste and match style", "paste special / plain text" or similar without trying default paste first. The headhunters will use their own formatting anyway.

This is the exact reason. I've worked for a lot of different contracting agencies, and they do this often.

@Davidw: That makes it really bad. Modern versions of Word can open PDF for edit.

It's a shame this answer was the accepted one, when it lacks detail, and doesn't address any of the ways that such a request from a recruiter could be cause for concern (or how to mitigate the associated risks). I hope the answer author incorporates some of the comments into the body of the answer.

@Theodore brevity is the soul of wit. If you want the best way to mitigate the associated risks,, paint yourself blue, face magnetic north, and waive a phillips head screwdriver your resume before sending it out. That will work just as well as any other method.