[tom_b]

The response is enthusiastic, but kind of misses the point my original comment was making. All I was saying in that comment is that as a hiring organization, we bring in candidates who on paper have the skills and experience we are looking for, but flame out in spectacular fashion when asked to talk about their skills, experience, and how they might apply to our specific problems and situation.

Note that I am carefully NOT saying, oh the candidate knows javascript, but not vue.js, so they don't fit for us. I am also not saying "oh, if only candidates knew we wanted them to get vue.js certified and it would be more likely we would put them in our interview loop."

I don't think the problem of how candidates can better understand why they are or are not getting callbacks from employers maps very well to any stats-based measurement of job posting descriptions against applicant resumes/CV/LinkedIn profiles.

My only thoughts on the hiring process are really anecdotal, but I believe a few things to be true.

  1 - Most job descriptions are crap.
  2 - Most jobs for software engineers can be done by any
  reasonably trained and/or experienced candidate 
  who can pass a work-sample test.
  3 - Totally untrained and inexperienced candidates 
  seem to apply to lots of jobs.
  4 - Software engineer hiring should be ideally 
  based on work-sample tests.
  4a - I have a *very* hard time finding companies 
  that do #4.