You're a new grad w/o enough practical skills or real work experience to get hired by a smaller, more nimble company that has modern hiring practices. In this case applying to a mega-corp is often your only realistic choice.

This is true, I live somewhere with basically no startup scene to speak of. So getting hired for any programming position offering reasonable pay basically means working for BigCo.

Nope, because mega-corps only do internships or '3-5 years' experience.

Factually incorrect, if you are talking about software engineering positions.

Source: College career fairs. BigCos come and recruit people in hordes. Around 60-70% of people graduating from UT, Austin went to a BigCo (Google, MS, Amazon etc)

Yes, but not everyone gets into the college recruiting gravy train. You either didn't go at a target school, or you didn't make the cut. Then you graduate and you're basically hung out to dry unless you know someone. This applies to many areas besides software engineering.

I mostly remember college careers fairs as a place where big companies tried to get you to apply for their internships.

Microsoft and Google and such usually had their own separate events, and I'll grant they were more serious about hiring people, though they mostly seemed to hire people who'd already been their interns.

I've experienced the opposite but that might be because I'm looking at software development jobs. Most of the mega-corps and the medium-large companies that do software development actively recruit new grads while the small companies are only looking for experienced people.

Because the newbies will work for less. They will work longer hours (to learn the ropes.) They don't have families and health issues, so they are cheaper to employ as well. They are less aware of their rights and have less long term outlook, which would steer them away from these sorts of HR miasmas.

Thus they are just the filler needed by BigCo to compensate from the continuous braindrain. Once they have the skills and know the ropes, they'll either get promoted or leave for an employer of choice.

That may be the case, but it doesn't mean the above statement isn't just factually wrong.

Pretty much every big company has a graduate scheme.

Willingness to hire newbies is orthogonal to the size of the company except maybe for the very small and very fast companies (short: startups) who just cannot bear the costs of bringing new employees up to speed. Btw, my first semi-steady job was two bosses, two admins and me being the third employee, the DB guy, still a student.

It is entirely possible for a company to have a great working environment and an incompetent HR team.

It is, but only for a very short time. `Evaporative cooling' and `dead sea effect' will quickly cause the better employees to jump the ship and the weaker to remain solidly entrenched.

Usually, but I spent a significant amount of time in an organization where even many of the good employees thought there was nowhere better to jump to or that such a transition was not feasible. Given the difficulty I had in getting out of there myself, I can understand where the latter feelings came from.

How much of that was due to your local job market, and how much of it was due to psychological conditioning from the company culture leading everyone to believe that it was hard to get out?

Because you need a job. You need money. You need experience. You need to get off the couch. You can't be picky.

Too many engineers on this site live (work) in a bubble. The rest of the labor force doesn't have it quite as good.

I went through the process because I really wanted to work for an international organization with a lot of prestige (the U.N. the World Bank or the I.M.F.

You're really just making the case that organizations with these hiring processes are terrible both ethically and as a place to work. I'm sure the NSA has an annoying hiring process too.

Do you want to sell sugar water, err, todo list apps for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?

Big organizations have the potential to be great places to work. How can you criticize the ethics of hiring at large organizations when we see daily accounts here about how terribly discriminatory startups can be with their "culture fit" requirements? I work for a large federally-funded organization. We are quite diverse, have good job security, we all get our own real offices, and we get to work on important problems that actually stand to make an impact in national policy. Sure, meals aren't free, but we also don't have Chet the Brogrammer Boss telling us to stay late on Friday to crush that javascript.

How would you know? Do we ever really know why we were hired or turned down?

Because I have to pay bills

Because you aren't a software dev in California or other extremely in-demand type; and you want a job.

Since almost all large companies are doing this, it means you'd have to ignore half of job offers, and the vast majority of people can't afford to be that picky, especially in the current job market.

Every big corp operates this way, would you want to not consider a company like google just because they have notoriously bad hiring people in their hr dept?

This article exists because this is quite prominent. Managers should be looking at resumes for high-skill jobs, not HR.