I see the problem. Experience is certainly valuable. But a resume also shows age and status. We're working to eliminate age discrimination (and other biases). That's part of why we do blind phone interviews.
...and accomplishments, leadership, responsibility (assuming no grossly fabricated lies).
> That's part of why we do blind phone interviews.
Phone calls still reveal a lot. Gender, age, native language, .... Only 100% text based communication is (reasonably) age+genderless.
We've been much more respectful of people (which is good for us) since we stopped looking at resumes.
It also conveys communication skills. What good is a programmer who can write code but can't write a document describing their own work history?
The world isn't programmers. What if you want a non-programmer role? Leads, organizers, directors? Do CEO candidates sit down and write a binary search tree? (of course not, being installed as a CEO means you are one of a privileged class who are given roles, not one who "tries out" for things.)
CEOs and other execs aren't screened with resumes. For better or worse, it's all about their networking skills, perception of previous history, etc.
There's a lot of this kind of thing you can do before even a phone interview, without consulting my employment references.
Everything in my resume is The Gospel Truth, but I am completely convinced that no one believes it. I really am.
That's the entire point in most cases. Don't want to hire a nerd when you need a bro.
Also: relevance! If you're hiring for a Linux-heavy job but the applicant has 20 years of Windows NT experience and they want a Senior Staff Linux Development role, you can either throw their resume away or talk them down to (an insulting) junior position.
In another context, say you're Google. You have 80,000 in-bound interested people wanting to interview with you per year. How, without up front resumes or other relevant information, do you deal? You can't talk to all of them.
That is, their HR people found my website on the web. They didn't find my cover letter and resume in their own applicant tracking system.
That's not the case everywhere; I was hired at Apple in the mid-nineties by applying directly to the company, then sometime later my manager-to-be dug up my resume in their system.
But as far as I am able to tell, resumes submitted to google wind up in the bit bucket.
Google's initial phone screen always consist of just a few very basic computer science questions.
Quite commonly phone screens with other companies consist of "How many years of java experience do you have? How many years of linux experience do you have? How many years of apache experience do you have?"
Oddly, there is never any concern for what one accomplished - nor failed to accomplish - during those years of experience.
I echo your sentiments that I have no idea what goes on in and around their resume system.
Currently, employers expect small amounts of lying about low-impact things - when a resume says "I made this", we all know it really means "I was on a team that designed this, and the company later outsourced its construction". We accept this because it's a social norm.
But say "I worked here" and everyone believes you.
Flatly illegal - yes, but widespread here in These United States.