It’s all referral or brand name (Stanford, mit, FAANG). If you didn’t go to a famous school make friends with someone who works where you want to be and get a referral through them.

I, or somebody else on our team, look at every single CV/resume that comes in, regardless of whether or not the HR team have looked at them.

We also aim to respond to every single applicant (i.e., beyond the initial automated acknowledgement), even if it's a straight no thanks. Every now and again somebody will slip through the net, but that's a mistake rather than the norm.

Lots of companies don't do either of those things. In their defense they probably get a lot more applicants for their roles, which makes it harder to keep on top of. Still, with half-decent modern ATSs it's generally pretty easy to quickly review and either reject or progress applicants, so it is infuriating if you apply for a job and just hear... nothing.

Another thing we do that a lot of companies don't is give feedback for applicants we've interviewed who haven't been successful. You know, sometimes it's the case that someone was decent and there wasn't anything specifically wrong, it's just that we spoke to someone else with more experience, or more relevant experience, so they didn't get the job, but we do try to give (hopefully) helpful feedback to rejected applicants as often as we can.

Occasionally that bites us in the ass because somebody will argue with the feedback, but not often enough that I'd want to stop doing it. The point I always try to remind people of is that they're never interviewing in a vacuum: we always have a cohort of applicants to consider so, whilst you might disagree with us that X is where you fell down in the interview, we're seeing that in the context of talking to half a dozen others about X, and how they performed, as well.