Five years ago I was working at a software company in Europe that was willing to accept hires from anywhere, globally.
We managed to hire about one smart person a month, out of a torrent of perhaps 1000 applicants per month. The vast majority (like 85%) of the applicants were from India and Pakistan. And out of those, 95% used the exact same resume/personal letter layout and content, sometimes down to the exact same wording.
We tried to be openminded, so we set up a bunch of interview calls with especially promisingly people from this "pool". After about 10-15 of those calls we just gave up.
We did eventually hire two indian people and were very happy with their contributions, but only after they had made their ways to our little country on their own. Imagine being a talented developer in India, interviewing for a job overseas, against this background of overwhelming mediocrity?
Generally I start classifying resumes into two piles: those that put everything they know on their resume, and those that include a handful of relevant, interesting pieces of knowledge with a few lines of job experience to back those up.
When "everything they know" fits on four pages, in my experience they aren't worth interviewing.
When "interesting pieces of knowledge" makes me want to ask more questions about what they did, in my experience they are worth interviewing.
Unfortunately the HR system scans for keywords, which makes the "interesting pieces of knowledge" resume less likely to get through HR and "everything they know" more likely to get through HR, which is the opposite of what I want to see. HR needs to either admit that they need to hire a developer to scan resumes instead of using automated software or just admit defeat and pass all resumes on, regardless of source or quality. They just are not capable of filtering software developer resumes in their current form.
Having an HR department filter resumes for qualification before the relevant manager/team sounds like an absolute disaster. If I heard that happened at the company I was at, I'd probably pack up and leave because I wouldn't want to work in a place where leadership doesn't realize how obviously stupid that is.
"HR" wasn't really involved in hiring, except as a secretary role here. The scanning and decisions were made by development managers and team leads. I think that's the way it should be.
(HR printed out all applications on paper. We sat in a meeting room to scan through them, and discuss them. The mechanism was: scan through each one; write your initial and then yay or nay. Obvious ones got into the yay/nay piles, then we debated the maybe pile. After all of that, HR set up interviews with the people who ended up in the yay pile.)
We managed to hire about one smart person a month, out of a torrent of perhaps 1000 applicants per month. The vast majority (like 85%) of the applicants were from India and Pakistan. And out of those, 95% used the exact same resume/personal letter layout and content, sometimes down to the exact same wording.
We tried to be openminded, so we set up a bunch of interview calls with especially promisingly people from this "pool". After about 10-15 of those calls we just gave up.
We did eventually hire two indian people and were very happy with their contributions, but only after they had made their ways to our little country on their own. Imagine being a talented developer in India, interviewing for a job overseas, against this background of overwhelming mediocrity?