> If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off.

This is wrong because you are presuming your conclusion (that fakers are the problem) already. Fakers aren't a problem, and it is the other reasons for avoiding the fire hose that matter.

But generally, I would agree. If it were possible to set up big box resume submission solutions and turn them off after a little while, it would be fine. There would be many qualified candidates. It might depend on exactly what specialized skills you need if hiring for a specialized role, but generally, yeah, you collect 1000 resumes and most of them correspond to people who can do the job, or who would need modest extra training or mentoring to do it at a high level.

You collect 1000 resumes and you definitely aren't gonna get 999 "fakers", and this fact isn't really the point.

The real problem is that you can't turn off the resume fire hose when your bucket fills up, because the existence of the fire hose is a political problem. You have to deal with HR having their nose in it, meetings and policy and bureaucracy about how to choose workday or greenhouse or some slick new start-up, whether to pay retainers for recruitment firms (who also might have perverse incentives).

Most often I, as the hiring manager, have no control over resume collection if it is done through generic application portals, online careers sites, or job aggregator sites. What happens is I get a weekly batch of some unreasonably large number of resumes, have to filter them myself or with my team, and then send back the approved ones to someone in HR. HR then does pre-screeners and comes back and says, "you can't hire any of those people because they all want competitive salaries" and we go again over and over, until 6 months have rolled by, my team is ready to vomit at the sight of another resume, and HR finally breaks down and lets us increase the budget, and we go back to some candidate we wanted to hire from the original batch of resumes, but they got a job in the meantime, and we repeat.

Your comment seems to presume that internet scale fire hose of resumes somehow doesn't get managed by a bureaucratic HR system, but that's never the case (anymore, not even in early start-ups).

You avoid the fire hose because it requires affixing a bureaucratic collection mechanism to the front that mediates how you are able to review resumes, and limits you from choosing the candidates you want.

You're right that if you could turn on the fire hose for some time amount of time then you'd move through qualified candidates very fast. But you can't by the very nature of the apparatuses you are forced to use if you use an internet-wide fire hose at all.

> By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X ...

I actually think this is more of a symptom of bureaucracy as well. Companies don't usually create job ads for specialist in X, and when they do, they usually are not coherent, and the hiring filters are also not coherent. So the company creates a job ad for specialists in X, but everything about the interview and hiring process makes it impossible for specialists in X to actually get hired (from coding trivia to salary limits to impossible wishlist job ads claiming to want 10 years of experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, etc.)

The problem is more that the company is saying, "We define 'specialist in X' as: costs less than $150k, has 13 years of experience with data science, and is an expert with React" because they don't know what they are talking about. The job ad maybe looks like it's a data science position, so someone who would actually be qualified for the job maybe has 5 years of experience in data science and no experience in React because that part is totally a mistake for whoever created the ad.

Then some pointy headed recruiter gets the application and thinks, geez this guy only has 5 years experience as a data scientist but we wanted 13, and he doesn't even have experience in React, but it says right here in the job ad they you need it! This guy is masquerading!

Anyway, it seems like we probably won't see eye to eye on it, and that's cool. I don't mind if lots of people keep cranking on big solicitations for thousands of resumes, because I can keep flying under the radar and using different techniques to find candidates.