Ask HN: How do you get what you need from the HR department?

I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a manager complain, “The HR department included ‘must have college degree’ in the job req even though I don’t care” or “They asked for 5 years of experience in a technology that’s only been around for 3” or “I have no idea why they rejected this candidate without even contacting me.” Still, in many cases you don’t have a choice. If you want to hire someone, you need to deal with HR, at least to a small degree – especially if you work in a big company. So I’m writing a feature story for technology managers, collecting real-world advice from people who learned their lessons the hard way. • Tell me about a frustration you had with the HR department (in regard to hiring). That is, tell me a personal story of HR-gone-wrong. Because we all love schadenfreude, and that gives me an emotional example with which to begin. • Let’s say you have a new opening in your department. In what ways do you involve HR? (That could be anything from, “give them general guidelines and let them choose the best candidates for me to interview” to “I do the search myself, and use HR only for on-boarding.”) What makes you choose that path? How much choice do you have in the matter? • What weaknesses have you discovered in your HR department’s ability to serve the needs of a tech-focused department? • What have you done to cope with those weaknesses? Which of those efforts worked, and which failed? • What do you wish you knew “n” years ago about dealing with your company’s HR department? • So that I can give the reader some context: Let me know how to refer to you in the article (at least, “Kim, a software architect at a Midwest insurance company”), and give me some idea of your company size (because the processes appropriate for a 70-person company aren’t the same for one with 7,000 employees).