When I was a section manager I had six EE's working under me. None of them could handle the jobs and I was doing about half of the design and all of the programming.

I was really dying to get qualified personnel. The company kicked the bucket and I went into the Human Resources office and looked to see who had actually applied - there were a dozen people perfectly qualified but whom the college degree holding human resources people did not present to me because THEY didn't feel they were qualified for my necessities.

Yeah, some of these other engineers also didn't have degrees. So what? It was MY judgement and not that of a headhunter or a HR person to make that decision.

I'm surprised that a section manager would have no input as to
qualifications of people applying for jobs he would supervise.

So am I. It was pretty much a standing policy that project managers,
in the company I worked for, had the last word in who they hired. The
theory was that in the event of a project failure that the manager
went down with the ship so he ought to pick his own crew.

Well, both of you sound to me like you don't have much experience in this area. But that's just how it sounds to me. My experience lines up with Tom's. I was QA manager at Symantec for a while. I was told to hire a half dozen QA engrs fresh out of SJ state. Out of a half dozen resumes received from HR. I was also told to hire at least one female, and one of the six was indeed female.

HR chooses which resumes to provide to the hiring manager. So you've got to get your resume past her, and she's a very mediocre person, a sheep who excels at toeing party lines, and will disqualify you for stepping outside the norm in any way, including doing so with pride - should you sound too proud or too dry, should you include a tech joke like "Enter =" she won't understand it and think you made a typo, and so on. This has always been the case, AFAICT. What I've seen change in the last decade is that now she wants to come be one of the 5 interviewers. She wants a 45 minute slot just like the engineers on the team, except all she can do is ask stupid **** like "Why do you want to work at Yahoo?", and "What is your greatest weakness", and look for any reason to disqualify you. And since you did not anticipate the question and simply answer honestly "Uhm.. your coworker called -me-!! And asked me to come to this interview and offered a nice pay rate and made the job sound good and Yahoo sound great." And then she looks down her nose at you after all the team members and manager loved you, and you don't get the job.

Or maybe she asks "Why do you want to work at Netflix?" And you look like a deer in the headlights and blubber "Well, everybody loves Netflix, and the NetFlix service, and I heard from several employees that it is an absolutely -great- place to work" then she looks at you deadpan. And if you add "and what's more it's near my house!! In 30 years I have never once had a 5 minute commute, it's always more like 45 min each way. That would be so incredible to get that 90 minutes/day back, and would lead to me coming in to the office after dinner, too, whereas that doesn't happen when it's 20 miles..." ... should you be so clumsy as that, she says "O-kaaaaaay. Why ELSE do you want to work at Netflix?" And you don't get the job.

HR lady does not see herself as less valuable in the selection process than the manager or teammates... in fact, the other way around. She thinks she is a professional in her field just like the engineers and the manager are in theirs, and should be an equal player in the process. In fact she sees herself as more insightful into people and personalities than the social zeros that the manager and engineers are, and therefore her responsibility to shepherd them a bit, and compensate for their inability to see who's "a fit with the company" like she can.

There is nobody in the organization that I think less of than HR lady.