At my company we put engineers (instead of HR) in charge of job descriptions, resume review, and phone screens and saw a sharp increase in quality of candidates we interviewed.
Being an interviewing engineer on the hiring side of a recent round at our company -- my goodness, I forgot how bad HR could make the tech hiring process.
I personally referred two excellent colleagues from past gigs, and had HR waste 3 hours of their time before DQing them because they mismatched on a cultural index quiz of some sort. I was not notified. When I finally found out, I was super embarrassed, and it damaged my relationship with one of the two friends. Guess how many colleagues I will be referring to this company in the future?
Our best applicants seemed to take weeks to schedule first interviews with. By the time we got to them, they had secured other gigs.
Strangely, many of the mediocre and "you're kidding, right?" candidates were actually promoted to us by our HR crew, wasting our time. I assume because their calendar times were widely open and available to us.
We ended up hiring some decent people, but.. I like to think if there was some sort of Quality Score we could apply, our HR team's involvement cost us 30% on the quality of people we ultimately brought on.
I wish I understood why companies did this. Our CTO apparently did not want to "ruffle feathers" to push back on HR's process. My continued howls of frustration about the process and its ineptitude actually got ME reprimanded. Which sent me back to the "fine, they're good enough" mindset in my screenings. Which completes the cycle of mediocrity.
I (engineer) wrote a job description for a job, pretty much cutting all the bullshit. Got quite a few good applicants, ended up hiring a random guy without a degree that is now making himself a well known name in the Flutter community.
Just taking job descriptions as an example, the state of tech job descriptions is an absolute, unbelievable, dumpster fire of an embarrassment.
If you have blatant typos, incorrect/missing information, botched formatting (copy+pasted bullets from Word to Outlook to LinkedIn to the point the formatting is mush), etc, you are going to get candidates of similar quality. I'm sure these job descriptions are written by recruiters/managers who would reject outright a candidate with a similar quality resume.
There is a parody idea along the lines of: if candidates wrote resumes like recruiters/managers write job descriptions.
We do the same. We also have a sane application process (no long series of interviews, no leetcode, no crazy "competency tests", etc.) And the devs on the team that has the open position have the most influential say as to whether or not we make an offer.
I had an SF-based startup to which I applied administer an IQ test as part of their interview process
It was really dumb--we're talking literally like 20 questions of "which shape comes next in the sequence", the kind of test administered to children to determine whether they qualify for advanced placement
