Totally agree. Totally understand.
I recently applied for a nationally advertised for a municipal government in Canada. They must have spent at least four or five thousand dollars (if not more) posting the position on the relevant professional and corporate websites in order to ‘attract’ the greatest amount of talent. It ended up going to a friend of mine. He didn’t even apply…just a had a ‘cafe’ proxy interview in a city thousands of kilometers away with his former boss who ‘knew’ the CAO of the municipality. Was hired the next day. No short list. Nothing. No one else even got a fucking chance because the muni was too lazy to follow through with the recruitment process.
I’m happy he has a job, but the process makes a mockery of the whole ‘transparent’ and ‘fair’ process that is much vaunted at the government level.
I would rather they just not advertise if they are going to pull shit like that.
I also hate online HR sites that don’t let you attach a .pdf of your resume forcing you to tear apart your painstakingly laid out and formatted resume into simple .txt bullshit.