But even that doesn't provide any quantitative judgement of what the job requires or what the applicant can do. It says they can write code that does X. I've

But even that doesn't provide any quantitative judgement of what the job requires or what the applicant can do. It says they can write code that does X. I've never been a part of or seen a job where the only real skills needed were syntax knowledge and basic familiarity with common algorithms. There's things like interpreting requirements, time/task/priority management, bug diagnosis, impact assessment, domain knowledge. How do you quantify "Can figure out why we keep getting kernel panics after the kernel upgrade on only some machines? Oh, the thing the machines have in common are they are the multi-core/multi-processor boxes. Is it a bug in our code or the kernel? Are they still acceptable for the position if they can't identify the problem, but can identify that rolling the kernel back is a viable short-term alternative?" The ideal scenario is the applicant mashes a button and gets a list of job they're truly qualified and a good fit for (as in, highly likely to get a phone screen on) and the hiring company can mash the same button. Everyone keeps trying to find new ways to invent or improve the button. No filter or screen is going to work until companies can definitively measure the quality of applicants between two postings for the same job (e.g., A/B test job position listings) and candidates determine if they are qualified based on that. There's a lot of problems to solve, but the biggest by far is the fact that 90% of the jobs out there have only "can breath, assistance to breath is ok" and "can show up" as the hard skills that are required. I'm not kidding, go spend a couple of hours on Monster, or Craigslist...at least programmer jobs have <arbitrary number of years> in <technology X>...most jobs don't.