While I agree that this indeed sounds like a problem, and a genuine one at that, for the HN community this should also sound like an opportunity, to create a resume sorting systems that is much much better than the ones out there.
Are there startups already looking at this problem? If not, why not? And, who's up for a challenge?
The problem is not the software. The problem are the employers. Everyone wants the perfect candidate. But no candidate is perfect. Everyone has good skills and bad baggage to carry from job to job. The aim should be to find people who will add to the team rather than building a perfect team. You can't do that with software (yet).
Well you're agreeing with me when you say "yet", and hence my comment about opportunity.
The problem is the software and the software is not going to go away. The opportunity is to make the software more intelligent so that the output is more in line with what would work.
Considering that it costs 20% for a match by a recruitment company, there is enourmous ROI for a program like that. It would almost be as good as the ability to print money.
Not to mention the cost you could get for the unemployed to sign up ("It costs you on average 2k/month not to use our service").
I think this could probably be handled using crowd sourcing approach within a company. The problem that I see with typical job postings is the tendency for people to over-tailor resumés (as is mentioned in the article).
I mentioned it in another comment already, but this problem is what I'm tackling with They Meet You (http://theymeetyou.com). At a minimum, I'll be using it where I work, but check it out if you want.
How it works is really simple: You can send a message to anyone that proves they work for a company, if you interest them then they can share their contact information with you.
Doomed to fail. If the company doesn't hire the person, that person considers me responsible. That opens me to potential legal liability. Why expose your employees to that risk?
The biggest problem I see in hiring people is that good resumes get filtered out by HR departments because the resumes don't have the precise keywords. Fix that by hiring smarter HR people.
I think the challenge is the opposite. When resumes are read exclusively by machines, they become protocol. We need a compiler that takes your skills and the job listing as input and produces output that satisfies the filter.
The thing is, it's not a resume-sorting problem at all. Most people aren't even qualified to be who they are.
In general, people aren't qualified to do their jobs. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing them, or be hired to do them. It means the qualification system is broken.
Are there startups already looking at this problem? If not, why not? And, who's up for a challenge?