First we must ask the question: how can we demoralize people the most effectively? An obvious place to start is to just ignore all their prior work. Since we're starting from scratch we need a baseline to gather where their technical skills are at. So you should ask them to do some kind of coding assessment task. Tell them not to spend more than an hour on it. Chances are good the most desperate will spend way more on it because they need the job. If you're lucky they'll even do it without asking for payment.
Spice it up a little! Why not throw in some real work that no one in your company wants to do? You can even ask the applicant to read your organizations repo code and write technical reports on it. That way, later if you do decide to hire them (unlikely) it will reduce your on-boarding costs... and if not... then fuck it, tbh. This isn't about making people feel good. It's about making sure you do what everyone else does. 'We've found that the assessment task is a good signal.'
Speaking of signals, how about you ignore the whole resume and focus on what matters. We both know resumes are largely a waste of time and people only get moved up in interviews for making plenty of eye contact. So make sure to fail everyone who doesn't stare at you the whole time. This is how to assess technical skills the most accurate way possible and its known the vast majority of managers fail people in interviews for not staring at them enough (staring increases productivity.)
Finally, you don't want to forget the computer science tests. At least four years in school and tons of debt is a lot to stomach compared to people who learned practical skills in their own time at a cost of almost nothing. Though chances are almost zero you use computer science knowledge in your job it's best to make sure you fail every self-taught developer who can't immediately balance a binary dick tree. It shouldn't concern you how many developers are self-taught and won't fit in your talent pipe line after doing this. Your hour long algorithm interviews are sure to make sure that only people who want to feel smart get hired.
If you put these measures into place you're sure to build the most mediocre organization possible. But there are other ways to improve the process. Experiment with calling your company 'remote' but only hire from certain timezones; Make sure the interviews happen in person. Hold as many meetings as possible. If there's one thing engineers love it's meetings that break up focused concentration time in their day. Even better if the meetings are only done at certain times in the day as that will be as hostile as possible to a remote working environment.
I want to make sure you don't have any funny ideas in your head about remote working. It might seem to offer flexible time management but people are ultimately children and its up to you to put in place measures to prevent this. If you do this right you can even manage to exclude people with chronic illnesses that would have otherwise been able to fit in your talent pipeline through remote work which I think is really something.
I hope this post has been helpful to other recruiters and hiring managers out there. Peace