[jordanb]

Word-only resumes indicate that the HR department is in control of the hiring process. This means that the company is passing up on excellent people for stupid reasons ("We're looking for people with "Unix" experience but this candidate only lists "Linux" and "BSD") and hiring incompetent people who happened to have won the Bingo game.

So the HR department is in the driver's seat on hiring is a good proxy for determining how good their engineering is.

Personally I think a better indicator than if a company is they Word-only or not is the quality of their job postings. HR is not competent to write job descriptions for engineers, and the idiotic descriptions that get passed around the internet are almost always an indicator that hiring is "HR's responsibility."

[MatthewPhillips]

Those job descriptions are stuff they find on the internet. It's divorced from the reality of the position; you only find that out when you do an actual interview. I'm not saying there aren't places where HR is in control of the hiring processes, but I also know from person experience that it can be the case where HR is in charge of posting positions and taking applications to simply hand off to Programming.