You may have seen a viral post circulating this week from a Subreddit titled “r/recruitinghell”.

The post describes a hiring manager being told for months by HR that there were no qualified candidates coming down the pipeline. So she decided to change her name and apply for the job herself with a resume that she —the hiring manager— deemed absolutely perfect for the role she needed to fill.

She was rejected in 6 minutes.

👉 If your HR people suck, their AI will also suck. The same is also true in reverse.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇

The reason she was rejected is because a filter that screens all the incoming resumes for a specific required tech skill was incorrectly set up. So everyone was getting rejected, even if they had the precise skills the job required.

Meanwhile, HR was just shrugging their shoulders, whining that a job market teeming with tech layoffs was somehow dry of tech talent.

Here’s the post:

This viral post has ignited heated discussion about the role that AI is playing in recruitment and hiring. And don’t get me wrong, AI is definitely fanning the fire.

But a shocking lack of good judgment on behalf of HR has been a problem for hiring managers, and qualified candidates, long before AI began filtering resumes. The grotesque failure in this particular instance isn’t the mis-set filtering tool (which may or may not have been AI-powered) — it’s the fact that HR blindly believed that there were no qualified candidates applying for six f*cking months.

I shuddered when I read this… because I’ve experienced HR hooey from both sides, as a hiring manager and as a qualified applicant.

And boy, do I have some stories…

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Before we move on, I’d like to note that the anonymous hiring manager who posted this on Reddit didn’t specify their gender, yet all the reporting has labeled them a man. So if those publications can make them a man without evidence, I can make them a woman without evidence. But really… we don’t know.

“Can you tell me about your marketing background?”, the recruiter asked in my first of many rounds interviews for a major tech company.

“Marketing background?”, I replied curiously. “Why is a marketing background relevant here?”

“Because you’re interviewing for a marketing role,” she asserted, clearly annoyed that I didn’t know this.

Blink.

So, as sweetly as possible, I asked her to point out the marketing functions in the role I was interviewing for. Which she couldn’t do. Because it wasn't a marketing role. It was an operations role.

And if you’re wondering how I made it all the way to the interview, it’s because I thought we had already cleared up this little misunderstanding. 

Here’s how it went down:

I had done some volunteering with the company in question, so by the time this opportunity came around, I already had a fantastic relationship with the hiring manager and most of the team that I’d be working with. 

And yet, I was on the fence. It was a big, thorny, bureaucratic organization. Not really my jam. But my friends assured me that their team was largely left alone by the corporate drones, and they really wanted me to join them. And examining the functions of the role, it was clear to all of us that I was uniquely well-suited.

Basically, the job was mine if I wanted it.

But of course, these big companies have formal hiring processes, so I’d need to apply, just like everyone else.

I took my time, and submitted a sincere and thoughtful application. I didn’t want to just slide in arrogantly because I already knew them. It was important to demonstrate effort and a genuine interest in the role. 

And a few days later, I was rewarded with an impersonal rejection email. Not gonna lie — it stung, even though I knew it was probably a mistake. 

I forwarded it to the hiring manager, who was shocked that I had been rejected, but even more importantly, confused by the reason HR provided: I didn’t have enough marketing experience.

The role I was applying for had nothing to do with marketing.

He cleared it up with them, and they “manually” moved me to the interview stage, where I’d then sit down with the recruiter to, again, talk about marketing. WTF.

Four interviews later (only one of them with the hiring manager, and the others with people from totally different departments) plus a skills assessment… and I was hired.

But if it had been up to HR, I wasn’t even worth an interview.

My new title? “Senior Marketing Manager”. Even though there was no marketing in my role. Because if you went high enough in my chain of command, you landed on the CMO. Which, in HR-logic, meant that I must be a marketer.

I soon found myself on the hiring side at the same company, recruiting a person to replace an insanely talented team member who was, much to my regret, moving on.

HR sent me four candidates — three of whom were not even close to being a good fit. One was a superstar. A goddamn Cinderella. In my mind, there was no contest.

But even though this new person would be reporting to me, I was just one member of the “hiring committee”. Like with my initiation a few months earlier, HR roped in a bunch of other people to interview these candidates and decide on a winner, despite the fact that most of them would never work with the new hire.

So there I sat… on a Zoom call with a bunch of randos discussing the merits of candidates who they’d never have to collaborate with, performing a job they had little understanding of.

They were all strongly leaning toward a candidate who we’d be poaching from our biggest competitor (which I guess made them think she’d be perfect). But this candidate had literally said in her interview with me, “I don’t create, I just report. If you need a creator, I’m the wrong person.”

We needed a creator.

Whoever we hired was going to have a massive impact on my department, the quality of our collective output, and frankly, my personal happiness at work. But the rest of the “hiring committee” would carry on with no consequence, no matter who we ended up handing the job to.

What kind of f*cked-up system allows them to easily out-vote me? 

In the end, I bullied them into hiring Cinderella — who was so damn perfect that she still works there. And we’re still friends.

But I had to be an asshole to get her hired.

In this next absurd scenario, we’re going to move from a bloated tech company to a bloated commercial real estate company. Same shitty HR, different industry.

I was building out a new team, and had two perfect candidates in mind to fill two critical roles. They were colleagues who I had worked with in the past, trusted deeply, and were ideally suited to the hugely specialized positions we needed to urgently fill.

They had also worked with each other before, and complemented each other’s talents and personalities beautifully. A dream team.

Let’s call them Bert and Ernie. 

But of course, we couldn’t just hand Bert and Ernie the jobs. They had to apply, and we had to go out to the market with the opportunities. I was fine with that. 

They were fine with that. 

And I swear to you that I kept an open mind. These weren’t the only roles we would need to fill in the coming months, and I was excited to begin assessing the available talent as we ramped up our new department.

But as the resumes came pouring in, it was clear that my instincts were correct, and Bert and Ernie were far and away the best choices. 

And in Bert’s case, HR agreed — even though he had less practical experience than Ernie. (More on that in a moment.)

After Bert's interviews, HR removed me from the process to begin offer negotiation. A week passed by. Then two. I followed up with HR, who told me that Bert had declined the offer, so they were rounding up more candidates for me.

Um. What? 

I immediately called Bert, furious that I had put my neck on the line for him, led him through the process, and handed him a job he told me he wanted.

But Bert was just as stunned as I was. Turned out, he hadn’t declined the offer at all. He had simply countered, asking for a little more money. Because, ya know, it was a negotiation. And his request wasn’t egregious in the slightest — he just (smartly) didn’t want to leave any money on the table.

HR figured —without asking me if we could pay more, or asking him if he would accept less— that he was too expensive, and we needed to return to the drawing board.

So I cleaned up that mess, got Bert hired, and moved my attention to Ernie, who HR had a beef with.

Ernie had ten years of highly unique practical experience which was critical to this role. He had worked for me directly, and for other dominant leaders in our industry — and everyone f*cking loved him. He had just received a promotion with his current employer, and they would have paid through the nose to keep him. The only reason he was considering leaving them was because he was excited by the idea of working with me and Bert again. He wanted good vibes — and we had each other’s backs.

But according to HR, he didn’t meet the “minimum qualifications”.

So I’m sitting in a stuffy conference room, with my boss, as the HR person in charge of hiring drops this bomb on us:

“We don’t hire people without bachelor’s degrees,” she proudly proclaimed. 

Ernie didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. Despite his decade of hyper-relevant experience, and my whole-hearted endorsement as someone he had directly reported to, she continued, “It’s probably best to start considering some other candidates.”

My boss smirked. He knew what I was about to say:

“I don’t have a bachelor's degree. Does that mean I’m fired?”

Y’all — this was before I completed my Harvard program, started teaching, or possessed any academic peg to lean on, whatsoever. I had no degree. I was a higher-education pariah. 

Yet HR was telling me I couldn’t hire someone who was goddamn perfect for the job —someone everyone else wanted, and we’d be lucky to win— because they didn’t have a degree.

I overrode HR, with full support of my boss, and hired Ernie. And that very night, I took him and Burt out for a drink to celebrate our new dream team:

What would’ve happened if I wasn’t… kind of a bitch? If I had fallen in line, and didn’t stand up to HR’s idiocracy to get Cinderella and Bert and Ernie hired?

What would’ve happened if I hadn’t been there at all?

All three of these individuals were vital to the success of the missions I was charged with leading. All three stood out miles ahead of the rest of the pool. And all three would have been completely squashed by HR.

And this was long before AI played any role in recruitment.

In fact, as a hiring manager, I would have far preferred to have AI —directed by me— sift through applications, rather than a shitty human with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove.

The problem with the hiring landscape now isn’t that AI is involved. It’s that the AI is being managed by f*cking morons.

And to everyone trying to navigate this… both on the job-seeker and talent-seeker side… I’m so sorry. I don’t think I can help, but let’s grab a drink and commiserate.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

P.S. — I don’t just write Drunk Business Advice — I bring it to life on stage. And I’d love to speak at your next event. Hit reply or click here to learn more.