I sent my resume to unnamed company today, and they insisted that I give them a plain-text copy and a “MS Word format” copy.

That causes a couple of problems for me. My latest resume is in OpenOffice format, and I can’t don’t trust it to save word documents that are pixel-perfect, so I loaded it up in Office 2007 — only to find out they required .doc format specifically.

Resumes are the most annoying documents to write because they aren’t so much about transmitting information as they are marketing material that someone will go over looking for any reason to not-choose you. So I like to go through a lot of iterations to figure out exactly what works best. And now I have to maintain

• the original OpenOffice format
• HTML version (I’m re-thinking this one)
• Word 97-2003 version
• PDF Version
• plain text version

…or just re-generate them every time (which is awful for the plain text & HTML versions). This company then wanted me to re-build my resume in an AJAX applet that kept misbehaving.

If it hadn’t been for a specific job I wanted at this company I wouldn’t have bothered — it makes me wonder how many qualified people they’re alienating with their application process.