You develop in Linux and are looking for work, and are requested to provide CV as a .doc file - what would you do?

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

> But it also sounds like 99% of the audience want DOC files

Depends on your audience.

There are two kinds of placement agencies / headhunters / employers.
One is volume-oriented. They have a pool of 4500 candidates with a set
of keywords in their CVs, and a pool of 2000 positions descriptions
with their keywords. They send CVs to prospective employers if 3 or
more keywords match. [A large company may have a need to hire 30
programmers and they may easily expect to receive hundreds if not
thousands CVs, so the problem is the same.] These cannot be bothered
to deal with one candidate whose CV is in a different format.

The other kind deal with hand-picked candidates, high level positions,
get higher fees (or expect a high return from a successful fill, in
case of employer), and have no problem investing a bit of extra effort
in opening a PDF file or loading HTML in Word and saving. A simple
matter of ROI.

I suspect that the people who commented on this thread and admitted to
maintaining  "non-traditional" (or maybe "traditional"?) CVs - Muli,
Nadav, myself - will not deal with the first kind of agency, ever.
FWIW, I can't recall getting a request for a .doc CV in a very long
time.

I'd say one needs to figure out whether one should target
volume-oriented or hand-picking outfits, and act accordingly.

> and it's a
> lot of effort to maintain that format from LaTeX,
> isn't it?

No.

It would, however, be a lot of effort for me to create a new (and good
looking) CV in a word-processor. Especially since I maintain several
versions of my CV - full (with some level of detail), brief (that fits
into 2 pages - I am not that young and have a history), sanitized
versions of both (with contact info stripped) - all that to assist
headhunters and potential employers with different needs and
requirements.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org