I'd blame it on HR. I do the the technical part of the interview for my company. We have a very easy short take home project that's given out after the phone

I'd blame it on HR. I do the the technical part of the interview for my company. We have a very easy short take home project that's given out after the phone screen. I'm not a big fan of take home projects, but they are a good filter. I purposely made it representative of the type of problems we solve, but very simplified. A junior dev should finish it in under an hour. A senior dev in our field could probably code it up in 15 minutes. When I review the code, I have a small rubric and also attach a paragraph of comments to it before it goes back to HR. Apparently, that all gets filtered to a yes/no call back to the candidate. I didn't know this until I ran into a candidate and he said all he got was a "we're going to pass" call from our HR folks.