[pasharayan]

Most resume's in non-technical fields (think management, banking, consulting, law etc) will have line items of deals/projects/responsibilities with rich information of how many people they've managed, the size of the deal, type of work etc.

Most of the time people don't want to post this on LinkedIn as its too public of a space to go about bragging of your achievements at employer X. With this system, Google basically has a window into this more specific information.

[GCA10]

It's possible to load up a traditional resume with 5-10 pages of granular detail like this, but that's actually more awkward than helpful. Once a (shorter) resume establishes basic competence, employers generally want to do the next round of screening based on face-to-face contact. Asking the resume to do all the work will lead you to hire the very best resume writers, rather than the very best candidates. (Note that strong passive candidates, who already have good jobs, do not spend a lot of time polishing their resumes.)

In non-technical fields, taking candidates through a face-to-face interview tends to be the best way of gauging grit, creativity, motivation, fit/compatibility, etc. That's especially true if the job specs are still fluid. In that case, a face-to-face interview lets both sides play around with the job description a bit.

Google is supremely good at coming up with engineering solution to engineering problems, and its decision to build an applicant tracking system is encouraging. But Google also is a bit prone to taking the same approach, no matter what. If we're talking about the full sweep of candidate assessment, that isn't an engineering problem.