> Actually, a resume just shows you can craft a resume.
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.)
If you wanted a programmer who could communicate well, why on earth would you want them to communicate work history? A well written resume can show good communication skills, but not necessarily the special flavor you need.
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.
Lying on a resume has cost many people not only their job, but also their careers. There's still the trust that you're only lying about small things as humans instinctively do, and that you're not misrepresenting major accomplishments or employment dates.
The goal is not to prevent lying, it's the find people who are good a particular job. This is not the same set of people who are good at writing an entirely truthful, impressive resume. There's some overlap but not as much as I would have guessed.
Lying precludes any filtering. You can't make an accurate decision with inaccurate information. (Or can you?)
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.
It is not hard at all to verify every last detail on my resume. You don't need my transcripts to verify that I graduated from UC Santa Cruz - just call or email the registrar. You can also find that I really did attend Caltech, because PDFs of my yearbooks are online, with my photographs in them.
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.
The problem isn't your resume, it's people who don't create good resumes but who are otherwise very skilled. I believe yours! I just don't believe resumes on aggregate are a good screening mechanism for most jobs. They also communicate lots of incidental information that can be false-bias flags.
> They also communicate lots of incidental information that can be false-bias flags.
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.
I submitted many resumes to google but met with no response. However I've interviewed six times now; each time, they found me by searching, uh, Google.
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.
A friend interviewed for a job as an apartment manager. The owner of the complex specifically asked her to deny African-American applicants based on the sounds of their voices over the telephone.
Flatly illegal - yes, but widespread here in These United States.
...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.