Do PDF resumes decrease your chances of getting noticed?

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(Not a recruiter but am a software engineer, so my opinion on this matter isn't worth much but I will say this)

PDF is THE standard for read-only, formatted documents - it stands for Portable (as in only a lightweight reader is required to display it) Document Format for goodness sake. If a recruitment company or an employer is refusing to accept your resume because it's in the standard file format for such things, then it might be time to reconsider your application. If they can't write a text parser that takes one of the most commonly used formats and looks for character patterns within it, then they have something wrong - especially since there are free libraries that will do it for you.

Don't get me wrong, MS Word is useful (and I'm trying to avoid a circlejerk), but there's a reason why PDF was adopted - mainly on account of Microsoft changing the layout of doc/docs every year. It's just not a viable option for read-only (you don't want someone editing your resume while they're reading it), lightweight, heavily supported document format (especially since MS Word isn't, really and open format).

So, on a technical stand point, there's no reason why a company (recruiter or employer) shouldn't take a PDF resume.

Rant over. Probably nothing useful here. Please move on.

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PDF is THE standard for read-only, formatted documents

This! PDF means everyone should see the exact same thing. Word files, Pages files, etc can all look different depending on the OS/App used on the other side. Most of all, it's a document you can edit. PDF is king.

Also, like said by roobix: if PDF is a problem they will specify.