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That just happened to me! I have been a contractor at a Fortune 50 company for a while and they opened a position for the job I'm doing. I applied and was rejected by the HR algorithm (the rejection email came about 2 minutes after I submitted my application so I seriously doubt that any humans were involved). The job site I had to apply through was taleo.net.

Centralized HR is for managing benefits and setting policies. They never help with the hiring process, in my experience.

I had a similar experience years ago. I was bootstrapping a startup and using consulting to pay the bills in lean months. Eventually I decided that I wasn't going to reach my market without massive investment to keep up with the PR of the 800lb gorillas, and I didn't want to go that route.

One of the engineering managers I had been working with as a consultant had tried to recruit me more than once, so I decided to accept. But shortly after a mandatory HR screening call, I got an apologetic rejection email from the engineering manager.

The correct thing to do there is to continue to consult and charge them $HR_IS_DUMB.

I did, of course :). But eventually the product revision I was consulting on was discontinued, I didn't feel like being a salesperson and a dev anymore, and I slowly found my way back into the traditional job market.

I once applied for a position at a company a friend worked at, and got a rejection less than a day later. I told this to my friend and he presumably got in touch with someone to assure them of my competence, and I got an email with steps to move forward to interviews the next day. HR filters are weird.

This also happened to me. Was seeking promotion for the job I was already doing. But university rules required the job be posted for 30 days. So I wrote the job description and requirements sent it to HR. And submitted my CV, which the job description was based on, into their portal. And was roundly rejected, automatically. My manager spoke with HR to ask what the hell was going on. And found out some politicking was involved and my CV was dumped for a better connected candidate.

Did you get the promotion?

Yes. My manager had to intervene. She's the one that told me why I wasn't being forwarded after asking HR.

This is one of the hardest things for me to grapple with in my career. I hate that there is realistically a hard ceiling to how successful I can be because I don't have strong network effects working for me.

I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I also did my Computer Science degree at a small university that was a community college when I started my degree. /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families, or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big cities or going to prestigious universities don't really understand what an advantage their networks are.

It takes time. Some people have a jumpstart, it is true, but there are ways for us who didn't, to build a network of trust.

Be good at what you do, genuinely help people, without expecting or calculating whether it'll be beneficial to you, stay close with those who help you, and who you helped.

Eventually, you'll find your way into a good cluster. Some start in the middle of it, we started in the periphery. Accrue good faith and trust and it will only keep growing. It's non linear. Something something preferential attachment.

Don't get me wrong, I do quite well compared to a lot of people. I'm not unhappy with my career. I am just not great at networking.

I have also had bad luck with jobs so far. Everywhere I go, people above me seem more inclined to try and keep me where I am than help me improve and grow. I always have very good relationships with my teammates though, so I know I'm doing something right.

I feel ya, people are hard, and bosses really influence how we experiences work. Advocating for oneself IS hard, more so when we are relatively comfortable.

I have some similarities in background as you and I _hated_ networking but I've been very happy with my career trajectory. You need to make sure you filter out highly political jobs during your job searches, do the best work you can, and maintain touch with the good people you've worked with. For the latter I email/text folks I want to work with again every quarter (using a calendar reminder to prompt me) just to keep the connection warm. For the first one, asking questions like "How do key decisions get made at this company?" or "Can you tell me about the last project that didn't go as planned, what happened afterwards?" will give you reasonably strong signal.

> You need to make sure you filter out highly political jobs during your job searches

I think this has been a big source of my grief so far. I keep winding up in heavily political companies.

Thank you for the advice. Networking is definitely something I intend to take more seriously. It's become much more clear to me how important it is as my career progresses.

Almost all companies are heavily political. It's inevitable given human nature in hierarchies.

Understanding social hierarchy is a skill that can be learned and you can raise your position in that hierarchy using that skill.

When people say "I'm not political" they're really just confessing to low social status and acumen. I personally wish things were different, but as you note they're not. So one may as well accept reality and play the game as best as one can. One can have a very successful career as a follower if one recognizes the traits of good leaders and the traits that good leaders are looking for.

> When people say "I'm not political" they're really just confessing to low social status and acumen.

Right. Politics is a tool often used to keep people with low social status where they are.

Maybe. They could be fearing being disliked, estranged, or an argument for having the "wrong" beliefs. (Politics, religion, computer languages.)

Much like gossip, politics is pack violence and order by other means, and is usable by people who have less physical power but more social influence. If you don't have either physical and social power, then you're dismissed as not a threat and ripe to be stepped-on. Gossip is often a political attack technique to take-down a physically-strong leader.

I would agree that almost all companies are political to some degree, but I wouldn't agree with heavily political. It's a sign of poor leadership if they end up in that state because you can minimize the impact of different goals and incentives, be they personal, professional, or organizational which is what drives basically all of politics.

Job-hop friend. Job-hop.

I was in a similar situation to you and through work I've developed a pretty good network of former colleagues. After about 10 years, it my network ended up stretching so far that I had contacts at basically every major company my city.

I mean, very few of my former colleagues ended up in the upper echelons of businesses, but almost all of them are in senior IC roles for which a recommendation carries a lot of weight, especially for an opening on their own team.

This happened a lot at the university I went to. Most jobs were civil service and applicants got extra points for veteran status, disability status, etc such that they were always the first in line for a position. To counteract this hiring managers would construct job requirements such as X years of experience in a combination of Y homegrown or highly customized applications and workflows so that basically only one person in the world (the person they wanted to hire) was qualified to fill the position. I'm not sure this was illegal but it seemed very unethical.

I have been on the other end of that. Applied for a network engineering job at a university, as the role was publicly announced. Ended up having the internal "designated candidate" on my interview panel. Not entirely surprisingly, I did not get the job.

I don't think I was supposed to know the name of the internal candidate, but having friends who worked for the uni, I knew the name and, well, the internal candidate would certainly have had a better culture fit.

>At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him.

I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss.

As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and didn't even look at the rest.

Our HR just checks if they completed the application correctly, i.e, included a CV and (if requested a covering letter). If they fail this bit they don't get to the sift. The sift of CVs/resumes (to whittle down for interview) is done by developers and so are the interviews.

This sounds like an amazing hiring process. Hopefully it becomes more common.

A CV should not be necessary

Edit: My apologies everyone. I actually read this as "cover letter" instead of CV.

I agree a resume (as noted below) should be required, but CV (academic style) is probably a US term not applicable here.

Sorry!

How else can i whittle down 30 applicants to 5 or 6 to invite to interview?

edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume, this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV) instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what you may have thought a CV was, however I would be interested to know.

In the US a CV is a comprehensive list of all previous work in the field, while a resume includes only the most recent/relevant experience. The term is primarily used for academic positions, where it includes a listing of all publications.

They could be meaning a resume as used in the US. Outside of the US (or at least in a number of European countries) what is called a resume in the US is referred to as a CV (though my understanding is that it's generally a few pages long, not a single page). Though this comes not from first-hand experience, but a lot of in-depth conversations with friends/coworkers from overseas, so I might be wrong here.

Our HR was like this too! They were amazing. They sent a spreadsheet with each applicant in it, greyed out the ones who didn't follow instructions, and bolded the ones that they thought I should read first based on how close their applications were.

I read all of them, even the greyed out ones, until I'd read enough to trust that the HR team's filter was well-calibrated, and I also let the HR team know when they got it right/wrong so they could improve their filtering process.

Overall it worked great but I understand that such functional HR teams are the exception, not the rule.

I worked at a company where the DevOps team was having a hard time retaining employees. New engineers were staying on average for less than 1 year, and that was when we'd actually get candidates, oftentimes going months without a single person applying. This was a large employer in a small town that paid extremely well and had the best benefits I've ever had so I couldn't understand it. That's when I went on the website and read the job posting. Minimum requirements were several years of experience each in Java, Python, and JavaScript. The team didn't write code in those languages, why were they mandatory requirements? The people that did have those skills were unhappy once they realized they weren't going to be doing any coding on this team. It made more sense to me to only list things like Ansible or Terraform or Docker, things the team used on a daily basis, and be up front with candidates about the job responsibilities.

On the same team there were a couple people who came from non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and production support, they loved the job and had been at the company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code that had any chance of introducing a bug.

This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all, silos can create policies that make complete sense to them that don't actually accomplish anything.

FB job reqs are drafted in collaboration with engineering, not imposed by HR (but really they are often copy-pasted and slightly modified from existing).

If you look at FB job reqs in prod network engineering (network in title, infrastructure is area of work), the qualifications should be reasonable. This covers most roles that are not pure SWE or rack and stack (SWE and "deployment and support" cover those roles).

~3-4 years ago a director shared a req and asked that we pass it on to our friends / anyone that might be interested. Some of us asked why specific items were in the req since they didn't reflect the team or our work. We also noted how it reinforced bias (women tend not to apply if they do not meet _all_ quals. men tend to apply if they meet _any_ quals).

Response was "good point, we'll remove them" and our reqs got a lot shorter and less exclusionary.

You might note that we tend to not have any education requirements. At one point the req listed university degrees. This was funny because we had a bimodal distribution of uni drop-out (maybe no high school diploma) on one side and MS or Ph.D on the other.

e.g. zero education requirements section in job reqs for my team: https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/

https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/

HR at a previous employer would write the job descriptions in partnership with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the descriptions had to apply to everyone in the position because they were also used for compensation research.

It took one manager months to get “Windows NT” removed from the description for a network position.

But why would you remove "Windows Network Technology" from a network position? Hehehehehe.

It's a joke and you're getting downvoted, but that is exactly the kind of reasoning the HR team I was describing would use. Lots of "common sense" like that, but they would use their own "knowledge" to do things like replace "OOP" with "Java." Harmless stuff if they had been working collaboratively (preferably in real time) with hiring managers who could double-check their work, but they were unwilling to do that. They wouldn't even let hiring managers view a req before they published it. And if you suggested that they not change technical terminology and not promote nice to haves to must haves, they acted like you were attacking their professional ability and their right to earn a living.

Yep, we used to do this dance on almost every job posting. Manager sends out the requirements, job posting goes up with completely different requirements, manager spends weeks getting the wording updated to something approximating the original... meantime, all our referrals have been rejected for not meeting the (incorrect) posted requirements.

> Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants.

That means it's too big and time to cut full time employees and hire contractors.

If HR are in charge of hiring for technical positions, the company has deep issues...

Stories like remind me so much of bizarre inefficiencies caused by targets etc in the Soviet Union. Thank goodness capitalism is efficient, right? /s