Hiring people comes with a high degree of risk. That is why you have a probation. Reading code is also risky. I usually forget why I did what I did and more often than I would like to admit the BLAME is mine - a resignated "..who wrote this?" often turns into - a-ha, it was me.
Resumes is good in the same way grades are good. They might get you to the interview, so don't knock it down just yet.
The hard skills are absolutely important! But the soft skills are equally so. When you talk to your candidate your first impression will be the most important indicator on wheter you will be able to endure working on varieties of task in the immediate future and far away future.
My favorite soft metric is to take them to lunch and observe how we can interact, talk and <sic> hygiene.
I think more organizations should have candidates (especially senior ones) give a job talk. It's standard practice in academia, but academic job talks tend to be overly long and high-stakes; basically an hour-long lecture about one's research. An industry job talk could just be a 15-minute presentation about a technical topic of the candidate's choosing, followed by Q&A. The candidate has full control over what the topic is, and the audience (i.e., the hiring panel) gets a good feel for that person's interests, communication skills, and soft skills.
This is what my company is currently doing. First step after a screener call is a 45 minute meeting with the hiring panel to present anything the candidate wishes - some presentations try to fill the full time, some are brief and there's more discussion.
We started doing this to get rid of the repetitive background summary the candidate has to give with each member of the hiring team in 1:1s. Overall, I think it's working well, and wish that places I was interviewing for myself would follow a similar process rather than multiple hours of 1:1 before a tech screen.
Resumes is good in the same way grades are good. They might get you to the interview, so don't knock it down just yet.
The hard skills are absolutely important! But the soft skills are equally so. When you talk to your candidate your first impression will be the most important indicator on wheter you will be able to endure working on varieties of task in the immediate future and far away future.
My favorite soft metric is to take them to lunch and observe how we can interact, talk and <sic> hygiene.