All joking aside, most of the hiring I've been part of has been as a third-party recruiter. I was that guy who trawled LinkedIn for keywords and only sent out InMail if I couldn't find your email and phone number elsewhere. I was the guy who went through piles of resumes on Indeed, again scanning for locations and keywords.
I've never been the one to 'pull the trigger' on a hire, though I did have no-go authority most of the time. I've been the guy who made sure you didn't get through if you didn't look right; I was the human alternative to an ATS.
It does seem that way, especially when you're on the outside of the decision. When you're trying to find one hire out of thousands, something as minor as a slightly unusually formatted resume can be enough reason to make a no-go decision. I'm not going to waste anyone's time by listing all of the minor data I used to decide whether the candidate was a fit or not; but what seems arbitrary on the outside feels very systematized on the inside.
We know that hiring process is totally broken, for exactly this reason. People use hunches and feelings and a whole range of subjective stuff instead of the only thing that actually works: a work sample.
In programming this is absolutely correct - but when it's for a management role, you can't just ask for some kind of work sample of a management decision. You have to go based on anecdotes and references. You do usually need to be able to define how this person specifically drove the company's profits when no one else did - because that's how you close to an in-house hiring manager or to upper management / ownership. But again, all you're likely to have is stories.
I've never been the one to 'pull the trigger' on a hire, though I did have no-go authority most of the time. I've been the guy who made sure you didn't get through if you didn't look right; I was the human alternative to an ATS.