> What's changed over the past fifteen years is that the internet has dramatically decreased the cost of identify in an open job listing and sending in an application. The stack of resumes you need to read through in order to start scheduling interviews has just gotten longer. The easier you make it to apply for jobs, the slower the hiring process becomes.

The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received:

(a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen)

(b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either)

My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute each because so many of the resumes are unqualified.

You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process.

Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.