> I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it.

Precisely. And who are we kidding? I know a lot of people that have performance objectives to grow $ or cut $. I don't know anyone who has a comp clawback for making bad hires.

Spending too long (vague) consulting for one company doesn't measure your competencies or value you bring to the team. I bet they just needed a reason to knock you out and shortlist the hiring manager's preferred candidate who they don't know personally, but know via close friend referral.

One of the hiring problems that companies face is they're now flooded with resumes. And the easiest thing to do is have many false-positive declines. That alone can explain lots of random declines.

This can also dovetail with illegal hiring discrimination: when there's an exec/manager who doesn't want to hire women, people with kids, people likely to feel pressure to have kids soon, military veterans, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc... it's really easy for those resumes to be among the ones quickly discarded, with or without pretext. It's plausibly deniable, because of all the random declines of good resumes.