It's easy to confuse a company with their HR department. Many well known companies that have good reputations in the developer community would only take Word docs.
I don't want a job at a firm where the HR department is free to dictate inflexible procedures to all and sundry. Requiring a Word document to make your internal workflow more comfortable for support personnel is bullshit. The workflow should be optimized for the comfort of candidates and hiring managers, everyone in between exists to serve those people.
To put it another way, you're talking about spending $20k+ on the job search itself, then $1-2 million on the employee across his tenure. Finding the right candidate is important. Don't treat me like a temp from ManPower.
The HR department's "inflexible procedures" are there to save the company money. Which do you think is higher: the activation energy (in terms of time, money, resources, and frustration) to retrain and retool the HR staff to accept resumes i whatever format (PDF, LaTeX, ODF, etc.) or the activation energy it takes you to stop whining and use Word like everybody else?
It doesn't make you a staffer from ManPower. The CEO probably submitted a Word resume.
The CEO probably doesn't even have a resume in the sense that you're thinking of. He is playing a different game entirely, where all decisionmaking authority rests with a handful of identifiable people who he is selling directly. You want to be playing his game.
This is a subjective matter. I'm not whining. I'm asserting quite clearly: you will never get a resume from me in a format other than PDF.
You, as an individual, are free to apply to those jobs with a Word resume. I won't bother. I will be absent from their candidate pool. In my book, that is very much not a problem.
I hardly think requiring a Word document is the same as "treating you like a temp from ManPower". Maybe ease up on the hyperbole a bit. We are talking about a file format.
Ah, but the file format is a proxy for a larger attitude problem.
A firm that demands my adherence to arbitrary rules before they'll even look at my marketing flyer is not a firm I want to work for. It reflects an attitude I do not appreciate.
