Forget HR at big corporations. Just forget it. Fill out whatever boilerplate you have to and get them out of the way as quickly as possible.
At one point I tried to get into the hiring pipeline to both streamline the process and to get better candidates in the door because the job adverts we were putting out were horrendous. Instead of seeking general problem solvers that were familiar with X, Y, Z technologies the adverts were specifying things like specific versions of Tomcat and JBoss. Long story short I just gave up. I couldn't get the recruiters out of the pipeline and they were the ones going to campuses and job fairs and gumming up the works. I couldn't get it across to them that we just wanted smart people and didn't really care if the person fell in front-end, back-end, or QA bucket.
This doesn't just happen in large companies. I've experienced this kind of useless gatekeeping with 50-100 person "startups".
I'm sometimes asked about tech hiring and I keep telling people that technical teams need to be responsible for technical recruiting. No one wants to hear that though.
Apparently, nobody on teams has time to invest in recruiting. Because meetings. Or something.
Here's the reality: these companies can't hire. I know it and they know it.
They can't hire because they're invested in cancerous HR bureaucracy. Think The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the opening scene in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life." Turns out there's a reason why The Very Big Corporation of America can't move fast and hire the people they need. And a lot of smaller companies trying in vain to hire like this don't have any excuse to act like VBCA because they aren't big now and never will be.
They can't hire because they won't pay market salaries, don't offer enough equity, and try to make up for it with a combination of pizza, Red Bull, foosball, and nerf guns.
They can't hire because their office is a place that makes Initech (the company in Office Space) look appealing.
They can't hire because they skimp on benefits.
All this has been covered before, but VBCA refuses to learn anything new because they don't want to change the way they do things.
I got a job at a start up once - it lasted 3 days - I still dont understand what happened. I had been laid off from my job, decided to take a stab at relocating to the bay area, took me a couple weeks, landed a job at a storage startup - I was a contractor, but it was contract to hire - the interview was kinda odd - normal technical questions, then a very strange interview with the manager which mostly consisted of "when can you start?"
I'd like to point out - this was not some fly-by-night sort of deal - they we're clearly not on a shoestring budget, well funded by major industry players, offering a unique solution, and it was the true startup environment - replete with: engineers who looked as if they rolled out of bed, and into work - friday night beer, free lunch, well stocked soda, nap and gaming rooms, and of course the obligatory fooseball table.
My title was to be "Senior Technical Support Engineer" - on my first day I was handed an HP laptop - with nothing but Windows on it, and a manual for their product, which I read in about 2 hours (I read fast, and it was only about an inch/inch and a half thick) - my training consisted mostly of watching the guy next to me do calls - most of which have to do with license entitlement issues and anything beyond that or simple config issues, required come cli-fu to fix.
The next day, was really just a repeat of the first - I still don't have an ID badge or a phone at my desk - so I keep watching and listening to these calls, I also took a note on hoe the majority of the office was dressed - pretty casual - Asking my peers about Putty and other apps, I asked, and was told I have local admin on the box, for office, go thru IT - anything else, just install yourself - so I then installed putty and winscp, and went thru the rigmarole to get office installed.
The next day I showed up in toe shoes, jeans and a button up shirt - as I don't really have much in the way of dressy working clothes (plus they advertise not having a dress code on their website) - but my toe shoes are brown leather - so I figure it cant be that bad, I get a sneery look from the manager and an aside comment - later that day, I was called in - and told that this would be my last day - she said I spent the whole day on Facebook (at that time I didnt even have one), dressed unprofessionally and installed "advanced software" on my laptop - I of course protested, and indicated what I saw for dress - and then told her what I was told about tools - she told me I didn't need putty, that was too advanced.
That was that - and of course the consulting house that sent me in basically looked at me as mud - I got fired on the third day; who gets fired on the third day? - eventually 2 other people had a similar experience and I was in good graces again.
The moral of this is - its not enough to worry about HR - HR is one problem, you also need to make sure you have a sane way of onboarding people, no matter if your giant or not.
Consider this—that post about hiring programmers by Joel Spolsky that I posted above is 14 years old. 14 years, and these companies still don't get it!
i don't quite get the 'advanced software' part..how can it be criticism? and what an odd example..like, what other ssh client should one use if one were on winodws...
From the perspective of the agency recruiter, what seems to happen at some companies is that the development team just find the person they want through the agency recruiters and unless HR can find a better person, they tell HR to hire them and pay the recruiting agency. It's an approach that is hard for HR to argue against if they can't find a good person.
Interesting. What I occasionally see from recruiters is almost a bit of the opposite.
e.g.
"Seeking Junior Ruby on Rails developer with 8+ years in C++, JavaScript,
Delphi, AnyLisp, MongoDB, NoSQL, API, Agile, MooseTalk, Apache, GoLang
Experience contributing to the Linux Kernel preferred"
This does not only happen in software field but also in biomedical sciences. If the recruiter can't find exact keyword matches on your CV or resume then you are out of luck how much skillful or experienced you are in your field does not matter.
In fact big Pharma companies have algorithm developed for their job sites where if it cant find exact keywords on your resume then tough luck. Almost all time it will go to trash(virtual one).
American here. Had coffee a while ago with a manager complaining about this exact thing. Can't get talent on his team because of the "HR Firewall" blocking recruits for arbitrary reasons (not the right college degree, not enough 'years' of experience in the correct area, etc...)
Anne needs to stop talking to the personnel department and start talking to the CEO: tell him she needs authority to hire programmers without interference from the personnel department, and that said interference is the reason his favorite projects are behind schedule.
If he refuses, then she needs to either get on with her job with the people she has and accept that the schedule delays are not her fault and not her problem, or start looking for a job in a less dysfunctional company.
Recruited for a lot of big companies. I'm lucky that my current one is really good with hiring. Everyone super open with what they want and why.
There is a main concern about the interview process in this story. Anne's team should've been the one interviewing. Then they would know who would have the skills required.
Big defense contractors, horrifying beaurocracy and all, don't even recruit like this anymore. Source: I worked for one a few years ago and have friends who still work there.
I was curious, because I do agree that some of the flavor of job ads has changed, although I'd say more in the last few years. This was the second ad I opened on the SF CL: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/sof/4419917236.html
At one point I tried to get into the hiring pipeline to both streamline the process and to get better candidates in the door because the job adverts we were putting out were horrendous. Instead of seeking general problem solvers that were familiar with X, Y, Z technologies the adverts were specifying things like specific versions of Tomcat and JBoss. Long story short I just gave up. I couldn't get the recruiters out of the pipeline and they were the ones going to campuses and job fairs and gumming up the works. I couldn't get it across to them that we just wanted smart people and didn't really care if the person fell in front-end, back-end, or QA bucket.