I find it interesting that you presume the hit rate on bringing people in based on resumes would be very low. I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes.
Phone screens, however are a waste of time. It is difficult to establish rapport with someone over the phone, for both parties, and I've seen some people actually ask programming questions over the phone.
One very good engineer I hired, back before I was running my own show, did terrible on the phone screen.
I brought her in, though, because I saw something in the resume. She's asian and had a real problem talking on the phone, but eventually got the job and was great.
You are making a decision with an enormous impact. Therefore, it is critical that you do it based on a truthful assessment of the candidate-- not ideological prejudice.
I can tell a good engineer from a bad one, pretty well, using resumes.
I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw. It showed a businessperson meeting another in a typical office. The caption read "We really liked your resume and would be interested in meeting the person it describes."
Obviously you can select the good engineers a resume describes from the bad engineers a resume describes. What you cannot do from the resume alone is deal with false positives in the form of misrepresentations, nor with false negatives from people who are better at programming than they are at writing resumes.
You already know this, that's why you still have interviews. But I hope you can appreciate that additional information can help you pick out some red flags for the "good" resumes, thing you will want to ask about in an interview, and likewise a resume that doesn't seem all that great but is associated with good work on github.... Maybe that's a false negative and you want to interview them anyways to see if they simply suck at resume-writing.
I once was given a phone interview because a friend of mine knew the hiring manager. The manager really didn't want to waste time with me, he said, because I had just graduated from school, and thus I couldn't possibly be useful to him.
But at my friend's insisting, he gave me the interview, and summarily dismissed me.
A few weeks later the manager was fired from the company for some sort of unprofessional behavior, and replaced by someone who had just graduated from school.
Phone interviews aren't that bad, IMO, with proper use of http://i.seemikecode.com or something similar. But when there's a language barrier of some kind, they're definitely not going to be as useful.
Phone screens, however are a waste of time. It is difficult to establish rapport with someone over the phone, for both parties, and I've seen some people actually ask programming questions over the phone.
One very good engineer I hired, back before I was running my own show, did terrible on the phone screen.
I brought her in, though, because I saw something in the resume. She's asian and had a real problem talking on the phone, but eventually got the job and was great.
You are making a decision with an enormous impact. Therefore, it is critical that you do it based on a truthful assessment of the candidate-- not ideological prejudice.