It's not difficult to avoid the 'HR gateway' problem - just have HR concentrate on payroll, legal compliance issues, visas etc. & not interview or filter resumes. Interviewer should be the prospective recruit's direct manager, &/or someone who has/is or can do the job in question (wherever possible) and a seperate interview by someone else to confirm the first opinion. Is that rare? I've never hired any other way.
Among the many reasons that I avoid corporate IT. Some of the smell tests are nattering on and on about responsibilities like attending meetings, preparing reports. It's like telling a doctor to scrub before surgery.
yep, a key reason I avoid BigCorp as well. But your comparison may be off: I have read recently (I think from HN) that forcing doctors and nurses to scrub before surgery reduces disease. I know, we all like to think the docs will do this with no oversight, but apparently not.
This reminds me of that YC funded recruiting company (forgot the name--help!) that closed up shop and had their postmortem featured on HN recently. The conclusion was that HR departments aren't a profit center, so there's no motivation to innovate.
Maybe there should be a RFS for a better way to measure HR performance; that way, at least the pointy-haired bosses could be yelled at by their pointy-haired bosses when they score below industry average, or worse than last year.
