At those numbers, something is wrong with their process. Poor resume formatting/content, bad social skills during interview process. That's barely 2% call-back rate after an application.
But there has to be at least two things wrong here, since he had a very low success rate on applications and on interviews.
I tried to pick roles I am a decent fit at and I am seeing like a 1 in 20-30 response rate. LinkedIn jobs are showing 100+ applications for any job.