What I was trying to claim is that there’s a relationship between heuristics and the ham/spam ratio of the documents being classified. When there is very little ham and a lot of spam, my claim is that false negatives are extremely expensive. When the benefit of hiring is very high and the cost of interviewing is low, my claim is that false positives are relatively cheap.
Given these two, my claim is that given current market realities, when hiring programmers for a mission-critical role the best strategy is to go light on spam-filtering heuristics and heavy on direct inspection of the ham content.
But obviously, some heuristics have their place. To a certain extent, everything except “Start work on Monday, there will be three month’s probation” is a heuristic.
And “This article is almost complete useless” is also true, given that it says in many paragraphs using a contrived format what I just said in two paragraphs, it obviously contains a lot of redundancy and extraneous noise!
Now that I'm a bit more aware of the gazillion ways my resume can be mistakenly filtered, I can (i) work on defeating those filters, and (ii) not take it personally when it still doesn't pass through. I know it sounds obvious, but I didn't get it on a gut level until your story put me in the shoes of the recruiter, and showed me that one can be both reasonably competent, not evil, and still miss many relevant resumes.
After all, it's a "coding" metric, right?
Yes, I've contributed to open source projects, but that was before they migrated to github (or even to their current mailing list).
Still, I've been bitten by this demand.
The thing about formatting I can't answer if you are right or "most HR people" are right. The argument they bring seems as legitimate as yours: People who care about the looks of their result are more disciplined, probably faster (because they get the content and the formatting in the same time frame) and care more about working in that company. Does that sound unreasonable? Which one is right can only be told with data. And because of that I tend to support the HR guys. It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience then you and me.
(So indirectly I also agree that work experience can be a good discriminator concerning future work quality expectations)
Having data does not imply usefully analyzing it, and "experience" is nothing more than a plurality of anecdote. Without actually seeing the data, I think your best guess here should be 50/50, rather than the very biased-toward-the-high-end "more likely (of course not 100%)" that you have. Appeal to authority is especially dangerous when you are making decisions that affect your company's bottom line based on peoples' ability to format text.
I thought that was what investment banks wanted to hire?
As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly aligned or formatted. The irony was amplified by the fact that we were not a client-facing trading desk. Here the heuristic used (resume formatting) did not correlate with the desired attribute ([trading skills]) but did correlate well with some undesirable attributes (insecure children more concerned with form than function).