Whenever a company shows a too-big-to-care-about-candidate-experience attitude it's a symptom of their weakness not power. It's the sad aspect of scaling the organization without establishing a strong culture.

Exactly. This entire thread is an illustration of why, out of all of the things that startup founders have to worry about, the fear of being outcompeted by a megacorporation (OMG! What if Google/Apple/Microsoft is working on the same thing we're working on?) should not be one of them.

Many people don't want to work at Google.

Yes, they can fill their spots, but the reality is that hiring bullshit means that over time their candidate pool progressively filters to "the people who will put up with bullshit", and while it takes years to filter through, in the end you up becoming Microsoft.

There was a time when Microsoft was the bee's knees and was the elusive dream employer. Then they started various HR initiatives and it became a place that only a certain type of person wanted to work, and the result is the malaise and technology lack of leadership that Microsoft now evidences.

HR as a profession is often a scourge, and the more influence HR has at a company, the more inertia pushes towards decline.

I agree that HR is often a scourge. . .however, in my previous job I was elated with the way HR improved the hiring process in my department. First, they looked at the incredibly high - and quick - turnover in our department. They actually paid attention to the exit interviews/surveys. They told the management that people were leaving in droves because the jobs/roles/responsibilities/autonomy described during the interviews were radically different from what employees actually experienced - and employees were not happy about that. HR forced more "truth-in-advertising" and "truth-in-recruiting". HR forced them to include more SMEs in the process and to require that all of the interviewers - especially the non-SMEs and managers - to know best - or at least better - practices for interviewing. . .

"Person is willing to put up with nonsensical HR bullshit" and "person is a creative hacker" are damned near mutually exclusive.

Get your HR droids on a leash, folks, before they kill your company.

Ironically, Microsoft eventually got sued by employees a couple of times, cleaned up their "HR initiatives", and are now generally known as a fairly nice place to work, even when they're not cutting-edge.

Microsoft is still doing stack ranking. I believe that was a major part of the HR scourge he was referring to

Balance... HR taking over is a disaster, but equally if sales takes over, or marketing takes over, or IT takes over, or engineering takes over...

Because if engineering takes over, you'll become like Google was before the Google+ initiative.

They were doing just fine making things like Google Reader.

I suppose now Google is more balanced and their stock is much more valuable but their long term direction has changed significantly. They can now be disrupted.

>>"the people who will put up with bullshit"

Isn't that the case already???

Most people joining big web giants I know are generally the kind of people who don't do any great real work but practice hours daily and spend insane amount of time on interview sites, take huge efforts in achieving expertise in one thing and one thing alone 'clearing interviews'.

Ding! Google hires more people every week than were employed in total at the Series D startup I worked at before them.