It's my understanding that there is a colossal gap between the hiring bar imposed by recruiters and the companies' HR department and what's actually the company's engineering culture and practice.
My pet theory is that HR minions feel compelled to portray their role in the process as something that adds a lot of value and outputs candidates which meet a high hiring bar, even though in practice they just repeat meaningless rituals which only have a cursory relationship with aptitude and the engineering dept's needs.
I don't think HR is really that involved in the hiring process. They certainly aren't at my company. They'll read the job posting and make sure that there isn't anything illegal in it, but then that's it. It's up to the Engineering Managers to come up with a process, and make adjustments when there are roles to be filled.
This is the first time I've been involved in coming up with the process, but from what I've observed, it's a similar situation in other organizations.
> the hiring bar imposed by recruiters and the companies' HR department
That is simply not how things are. The hiring bar is designed and upheld by people on the same software engineering job ladder as a candidate. The role of recruiters is primarily coordination. The role of HR is compliance with local employment laws.
My pet theory is that HR minions feel compelled to portray their role in the process as something that adds a lot of value and outputs candidates which meet a high hiring bar, even though in practice they just repeat meaningless rituals which only have a cursory relationship with aptitude and the engineering dept's needs.