The recruiting funnel isn't supposed to be perfect. In fact, most of these 'elite firms' know that their recruiting funnels bring in, essentially, statistical noise. And that's just fine.
Your chances for being hired at an elite firm are roughly .5-1%, or roughly 1 hire per 100-200 applications. No filtering system in the world could accurately filter that many candidates in a reasonable amount of time. As it stands, using the highly flawed criteria we use, it still is an enormous drag on the firm to do hiring.
The criteria used - 'elite' school, impressive extracurriculars, good grades - were selected because of their performance in a quality-time trade off. Your choice in reading resumes is to do a good job with 90% accuracy at 15-20 minutes per resume vs a quick filter with 30% accuracy at 1-2 minutes per resume. With hundreds of applications to read through, which would you prefer?
Also, to build on that. There was a time I did some grading of short essays. When I first started doing that I read through all the stuff very attentively and tried understanding everything. As time went on I later was able to get a good feel for quality and could tell if something was going to be good or not pretty efficiently.
It may seem unfair, but really, over time you acquire a pretty good filter. There are probably similarities with reading through resumes. You become familiar with gauging a resume reasonably well with a few seconds or minutes of reading through them --after you've read through enough of them. It's repetition and pattern recognition, in a way.
200 * 20 minutes = 40 hours. @ 500$/hour your only up to 20,000$ which suggests you expect to waste 20k from picking the wrong person. But, the reality is the first year is just a long interview and if you don't get the bonus you where fairly cheap labor (relative to the market).
Your chances for being hired at an elite firm are roughly .5-1%, or roughly 1 hire per 100-200 applications. No filtering system in the world could accurately filter that many candidates in a reasonable amount of time. As it stands, using the highly flawed criteria we use, it still is an enormous drag on the firm to do hiring.
The criteria used - 'elite' school, impressive extracurriculars, good grades - were selected because of their performance in a quality-time trade off. Your choice in reading resumes is to do a good job with 90% accuracy at 15-20 minutes per resume vs a quick filter with 30% accuracy at 1-2 minutes per resume. With hundreds of applications to read through, which would you prefer?