This is a repost from a Disquis comment I made 6 years ago. I ran across it felt like it needed to be put into a permanent place.

The basis of the question is that an HR person did a phone interview with a potential hire and he was clueless about the company that was the potential employer. He asked what the company did among other questions.  From the potential employee's perspective; it was a cold call. Yes, he had applied to the company, but as I say below, he really had just dropped a resume into a bottomless pit....

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Why did the interviewee not know the answers? The bottom line is that we are forced to broadcast our resumes to literally THOUSANDS of potential jobs to squeak past the screening software. It is not as if we have time to do due diligence on each one. Had you called, said whom your company was and given him a couple days or just a few hours, he would have been able to answer the questions he asked you to answer for him. In a perfect world, we would choose an employer and seek that job until we are chosen or not.
I have applied for jobs where I have had a general idea of the location. East Texas could mean anything from Hunt County to Chambers County. Literally fifty miles east of Dallas to adjacent to Houston. I interviewed twice on the phone for an opportunity before the exact location came out. It was 225 miles from where I lived and the pay was just a good hourly job... I probably would have considered $12 an hour near here, but not in Jasper. (There is nothing wrong with Jasper, but it is over 200 miles from here.)
While the person asked the wrong questions, he did not want to waste your time or his. I have seen two different jobs advertised almost exactly that paid $20k and $60K respectively. I really do not think that the hiring people have any idea what we face. If it were only as simple as sending a resume to a few targeted employers, but it is not. I once did my networking well. I found a good internal contact (a friend of a friend) had the HR people at the employer help me fill out the online application (NO WAY AROUND IT!). I had held a position that was 95% the same previously. MY qualifications were impeccable for the position. The HR folks could see about 15 names, I was not on the list. When we compared resumes, the one difference we could find was the majority of them the Flesch-Kincaid scores were about half a grade lower. We all felt like that was irrelevant especially in light of the fact resumes are at about the high-school sophomore level. There didn't seem to be a common thread to how the software scored the candidates. I was probably way too far inside, but I DID NOT learn a thing. Their HR people did not have a clue Perhaps someone at corporate knew the secret, but the folks at the local level were not privy.
I have gotten six interviews in the past year: two were supported by carefully crafted cover letters. Three were just applications or resumes dropped into the system (or as I call it the dark abyss. ) The final one I was screened from a board posting. Like I said before, the most prepared I was for any of them, I did not get past the screening software.
I read a few days ago, about a group of potential employees who were allowed to apply by lottery.(A set number of applications were passed out) Sometimes I wonder if this may be part of the software or at least the first X number of applicants or the ones who applied on Thursday or Friday...or you get the idea, a particular random day.
How many apply to a given job. I bet the average hiring manager has no idea. Those who take faxed or emailed ones do. DO they look at them all? I doubt it. I think the incredible luck that you are actually talking to a real person at a given time is huge. The fact you haven't had interviews is held against you too. IE YOU DID NOT EVEN GET AN INTERVIEW.