The instructions I give these recruiters are designed to whittle the number down to a manageable amount that I can go through in detail.
I don’t think today’s LLMs with good fine tuning and prompting would perform any worse than the nontechnical humans doing this particular task. I’m actually shocked our ATS doesn’t have this feature already.
"[whittling] the number down" is generally not a good way to find the best applicants, because it is purely focused on reducing the number of applications rather than picking out potentially good ones. It's a safe, low-risk approach that reduces variance.
400 resumes @ 1min per (Which is generous) is ~7hrs.
400 resumes @ 10sec per is only ~1hr.
Recruiters might be useful at filtering out obvious spam, though I don't feel like can help with much past that and I think they're also liable to put legitimate but unconventional candidates in the spam pile.
It's the low "cost" of publishing a job post to various boards, and the low "cost" of applying to jobs that are posted.
The combinatorial math has exploded the number of applicants per position, but the talent pool has not expanded by that much.
The net result is companies are abdicating agency to ATS systems in an effort to filter the "best" resumes.
Candidates are responding by feeling disillusioned by the ghosting, non-responses, and 400 applications within 24 hours to any new job posting.
There are probably more than enough lower paying, lower prestige jobs on offer, but they don’t require academic qualifications and so university graduates feel they deserve better.
There’s also the issue that people will get dismissed as “overqualified”.