As awful as the resume process is it has one advantage that the author seems to have ignored - it's 'fair'. It puts everyone in basically the same footing at the start of the hiring process.
Using a system based on recommendations would give popular, attractive, well-connected people an advantage that's unrelated to their skill level. It would make job hopping more beneficial because you'd get to meet and connect with more people.
Maybe it's unreasonable of me, but I slightly suspect the author would prefer recommendation based hiring because it'd benefit them rather than because it'd be a better system for everyone.
Author here. I don't think any of these points are unreasonable.
I think the apparent conflict comes into play when we treat your point and my point like they are mutually exclusive. But they don't have to be - the resume system can be horrific and the alternatives can be bad in other ways, all in one swoop. It would honestly be weirder if it weren't so - it would imply a perfect process.
For what it's worth, I'm not exactly proposing a "system based on recommendations", and I'm not sure how that would really work if I was proposing it. I'm more saying that the kind of treatment people get when they can bypass the resume-first system is much more human - ideally, there would be a fix that would bring the resume-first system up to the nepotistic treatment level, but I don't claim to know what that is.
Using a system based on recommendations would give popular, attractive, well-connected people an advantage that's unrelated to their skill level. It would make job hopping more beneficial because you'd get to meet and connect with more people.
Maybe it's unreasonable of me, but I slightly suspect the author would prefer recommendation based hiring because it'd benefit them rather than because it'd be a better system for everyone.