Because that’s how it worked for pretty much everything back in the day when your chances of getting a loan from the bank depended on the impression of trustworthiness you projected on the bank manager when you asked for it, rather than some obscure algorithm running in the bank’s systems that didn’t take in account any feedback from an actual human.

Amongst large companies automation removed humans from the loop, at least at an early stage, so now your machine processable input and/or information about you extracted from some other sources about what you’ve done so far, matching whatever the algorithm is configured to favor is all that matters. Sure, beyond that you’ll almost certainly end up with a person making a final decision (for hiring, not for bank loans), but you first have to pass that big initial automated hurdle that’s supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Amongst other things this has killed “being judged as having potential” as a way to get a foot on the door, unless you have a high score on a metric supposedly correlated to it such as good grades at a supposedly elite university, since unlike “impression” such metrics can be mathematically evaluated and compared by algorithms.

Mind you, when looking for work in smaller companies that haven’t outsourced their hiring, impressions still work since your first point of contact is going to be a person whose opinion counts rather than an algorithm or a person too low on the pecking scale for their judgement to be taken in account.