This has been my problem as well. I didn't want to say too much in the original post as I wanted to see if others would say the same. I've seen a few comments mentioning this. I noticed the inability to get interviews right around when chatgpt dropped, so I think it might be AI screening related.

Oh yeah actually because they can't parse it automatically as easily as a word document or whatever, the form of a pdf is too ambiguous to easily parse from what I understand, so you don't even pass the robot. Hiring management is like a secretarial job mostly. Especially in the americas I find this is the case, that you might not even have someone with your skillset looking at your resume before it gets passed on to someone who does. I've seen the worst people hired through procedures like that hahaha

It's awful that this is the case but you really just want to make it a word document because of administration staff and software who are tasked with filtering things based on really the most arbitrary of reasons, but that's how much of the business world works because Microsoft went and built everything so hard around office collaboration at the expense of stuff like security or open standards

There may also for security reasons be policies against opening or even receiving PDF attachments in email.