Public job postings get hundreds or thousands of applications, most of which are terrible and need to be filtered out. Expecting an immediate response on one is not reasonable.
If your friend is such an industry insider, it's surprising she didn't have a network that could short circuit this process for her.
In general, my experience that if you are cold-applying for a job, you are very likely to get lost in a pile of trash. The recruiting experience is much better if the company finds out about you on their own and goes after you. Having an internal referral is a form of that.
Month does sound long to me, but "a few weeks" isn't crazy given the reality on the ground.
Note, I am not saying this is good or how it ought to be, I am just saying how it is.
Let me ask you - if you were the recruiter at Apple and let's say you owned 5 roles each of which got 2000 resumes (I am stabbing at a number but it's Apple, so likely tons of people jump on every role) - how long would it take you to get through it all?
Back of the envelope: 5 roles x 2k resumes = 10k resumes.
If it took you just one minute to read a resume and you did nothing but read them every day for 10 hours that's like 17 working days = so 3+ weeks.
Keep in mind that this pile of resumes is your lowest likelihood of success pile - these are not the people you'd identified priori as targets, they weren't even internally referred, they are just mainly random people spamming you or are very weakly qualified. It "doesn't matter" if one of them is a diamond in the rough like the op was describing - it might take you weeks to get to their resume, and that's only if you don't fill the role w someone from the higher bandwidth channel.
So like I said, not "great" but - what would you do differently if you were HR here?
Pull out 200 of each set, or whatever number you like. Email the other 1800 and say "thanks, but we have decided not to interview you for this role. We'll keep your resume and contact you again if we have a role that you seem good for". Read all the remaining resumes over the next week.
And for all the AI prowess these large companies purport to have, I would expect a very efficient automated first-pass filter to significantly reduce the search space.
Also, there are roles --where time and expertise are a requirement-- that cannot possibly get thousands of legitimate applicants. Some not even hundreds.
> what would you do differently if you were HR here?
Hire more HR staff to reduce queue times? Apple literally has $100b+ of cash that they don't know what to do with, they could spend some of it on improving their hiring.
Public job postings get hundreds or thousands of applications, most of which are terrible and need to be filtered out. Expecting an immediate response on one is not reasonable.
If your friend is such an industry insider, it's surprising she didn't have a network that could short circuit this process for her.
In general, my experience that if you are cold-applying for a job, you are very likely to get lost in a pile of trash. The recruiting experience is much better if the company finds out about you on their own and goes after you. Having an internal referral is a form of that.