The problem with modern hiring practices is that they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hiring based on past experience is biased and often can lead to either subpar candidates (lemons) or overpaying. You're either left with the people who didn't succeed at their previous job (but are good talkers) or people who have a brand name college/company but aren't really exceptional. On the other hand, trying to completely ignore past experience means you're left asking questions completely unrelated to real world work.
* they don't trust their interviewers to be professional and objective, or
* they're trying to have a EEOC CYA paper trail that says they make efforts to be unbiased, or
* DEI motivated (e.g., not everyone has the advantage of good past experience as a starting point for conversations), or
* some other HR theory?