I'd be tempted to make an image of the PDF and insert it into a Word document so it fills the page, but that would probably have broken their workflow (Word's inline comments, perhaps) and dropped me straight into the reject pile.

From what I can tell, their general "workflow" is to shove the Word document into a parser that grabs your name, address, experience, education, etc. and puts it into a searchable format so that can filter on certain keywords. The reason they need to Word doc is because it's the only format their parser accepts...

That kind of inflexibility seems like a good signal that you might not want to work there anyway.

I agree- unfortunately, sometimes I am desperate and end up taking the job for lack of other options :(

I don't think I've seen a job that required Word since about 2009, and back then I wasn't using LaTex so I didn't have the problem but don't any of the LaTex to word tools or services I see around work?

latex2html -> html2rtf

I've used that for years. No problems, though the odd jobsite's commented on formatting, giving me an opportunity to explain the generator ;-)

Hmm I like that idea! I'll have to try it out next time a company asks for a word doc.

Pandoc can probably produce docx directly, if that's your goal. Pandoc rocks.