>This makes almost no sense for most roles, including any type of specialist as well as middle/senior management, and you end up with situations like you faced.
Worth noting that for specialist roles and middle/senior management, there are special pipelines. The problems seems to be a mismatch in what the average person thinks is "specialist" and what Google thinks is specialist. Lots of people think they're specialists, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but more often than not it doesn't matter anyway. "I built an app" or "I built a tool used by many of your engineers" or whatever doesn't make you a specialist. It might be a reason to stick you into the generalist SWE pipeline, and it might be a 20% project for you
There's a surprisingly high hit rate for "checking random notable person in the OSS community in the company directory". They almost never work on things related to their public notoriety.
The one exception to this is research staff. Someone notable for their research is probably hired for their research. But this doesn't mean that any PhD will be hired for their research, much as you won't be extending your thesis if you get hired by a quant trading firm.
>If it makes you feel better, it's equally frustrating for hiring managers, who just get input from recruiters that so-and-so failed the phone screen.
This is perhaps the single most important aspect of the hiring process at the bigCos. The hiring process is built from the ground up to prevent you from doing this. The companies have a level of technical competency they expect from employees. Your first priority as a manager isn't to maintain that level of technical competency, its to have someone fill your headcount.
If they let you screen people, then either they let you waste other people's time on candidates who should have been screened out, or they let you make the final hiring decision, and you potentially hire someone who doesn't meet the global competency level. This ends up getting silos and requiring interviews to switch teams and having "weak" and "strong" teams and such, which is still sometimes a problem at Google, and Amazon, but no where near like it was apparently an issue in the Microsoft of old.