I worked for AOL in 2005-2006 back before the huge layoffs occurred (and me included) and it had a similar "college campus" vibe. Overall, it wasn't a bad plac

I worked for AOL in 2005-2006 back before the huge layoffs occurred (and me included) and it had a similar "college campus" vibe. Overall, it wasn't a bad place to work, but upper management was a living testament to Dilbert. The company I work for now has a wide range of ages, including a lot of older people... which is good, because I'm 50 now. AOL's hiring process at the time was similarly dysfunctional. I'd interviewed once a year or two previously, but never heard back (which I didn't realize at the time is now the norm). The only reason I was able to eventually get in was because I had a friend working there who got me past the HR barriers. This friend, who was much more experienced than I was only able to be hired when a technical manager stumbled across his resume. Apparently, he couldn't get past HR either, but when the manager found about my friend his attitude was "Why in the world aren't we interviewing this guy?!" As I said, I got laid off, but my friend is still there. My experience with some companies has been that hiring is run by HR people who have no idea what they are doing, or whom they are looking for, or how to filter resumes by anything other than keywords (e.g., the proverbial "10 years experience with a two-year-old technology" nonsense) and so the hiring managers often never get a chance to see candidates they would be very interested in.