We recently hired an applicant with a Masters degree in computer science. I was his first manager. His first assignment was to write a web application in Java which on his resume was an area of expertise. The result after three months was less useful than I could have gotten from a high school freshman. Yet we could not ask him to compose sample code during the interview.
Within 90 days, you should be able to tell whether a guy can code or not. We hired a guy as a programmer once and put him on the oncall list. The first time he was called, we found out he couldn't code "I'm not really very technical". They moved him to Project Manager. All of that was within 60 days.
I worked with a guy who got cut in 89 days (90 day probation). He was worthless.
>>With potential employees lying on their resumes and certain categories of questions not allowed by law, how does an employer screen out the "bad actors" from the applicants with really solid backgrounds?<<
Good question. How did they used to do it?
I like the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". IOW, I think a criminal record check is fine. It will tell them if you have actually done the crime. This is just way too proactive for 99% of the jobs out there. There are exceptions, just as some crimes call for the death penalty. But just as applying the death penalty to all crimes would drastically reduce crime - but be obviously draconian - I think this does the same regarding individual human beings lives.
And our country was founded on the concept of individual rights. Take that away and the country as we know it ceases to exist. But to be frank, I think we crossed that bridge years ago.
Is this a state issue? I've had to provide code samples/take a coding test on the last three programming jobs I've had.