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 pe

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. Sigh. It should be better than this.