I think that if I’m qualified to work at Microsoft, I’m qualified to work anywhere

Surely you mean “within a certain subfield”. Do you think you’re qualified to captain a boat? Or work on an oil rig?

hiring problem

Two thoughts.

One: if you read Hacker News, you saw Dominic Connor’s piece in the Telegraph, linked last week. I clicked thru to his other Telegraph pieces after that; he admits that HR people at large banks do not know about IT; they look up questions online and try to spot liars. They see their job as “protecting management” from those whose CV’s had the right keywords but were just lying. Obviously the system underlying all of that is not meant to deal with individual candidates with unique traits; it views candidates as a mass of keywords and valued norms (such as “continuous employment at increasing levels of seniority”) and then adds on a crude filter. Welcome to large organisations.

The second is something I noticed in myself years ago and that I continue to notice in graduates. The messages one gets in school are largely incompatible with what employers want. Studying hard, identification with the subject matter one has struggled with (who in business has any idea what it means to hire someone from low-dimensional topology versus a harmonic analyst?), and information about “the real world” coming from journalistic publications (hype) rather than careerists in situ (good information) all had a deleterious effect on my early career.

unfair

That’s not really the company’s problem, is it? Say you were running a business, are you going to hand out charity jobs because it’s the nice thing to do? Or are you trying to solve your own problems.

contracting

I agree, this sounds like a great idea. But maybe there’s some reason HR doesn’t do it so often. I remember one firm that was iffy about me wanted to do a contract job to start, but neither I nor the hiring manager could figure out a short-term intersection between my skills and the company’s needs — I needed to invest a few months in the company before I would understand their business well enough to help with their problems; I didn’t want to do that for free, and they didn’t want to risk the cash on me.

I want companies to stop thinking the talent isn’t out there

I think this is just a form of whining, as much as “It’s not fair that I don’t have a job.” If companies spent more money on recruiting and on candidates they would find more; if they spent more on hiring, they would filter better; end of story.

Your ideas may help many companies like us.

Which is also completely false. Microsoft culture is greatly incompatible with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook or Rackspace. Those companies are moved by fast-pace innovation and are they are dynamically similar to a start-up.

Microsoft average profile is much similar Oracle’s and IBM.

I liked your article very much – it was kinda a philosophical essay.
Some people got it wrong an started bitching around and showing their antipathy for certain companies. That’s a waste of time and space in this blog.
As you say, it’s mostly hard to get a chance to show where you are good at. And this is a source of frustration for the applicant. But maybe the applicant should realize this and show, that he can also learn and adapt to a recruitment style he or she doesn’t like.
But of course it would be nice to get the chance to show talent and ambition more easy – but it’s hard for companies to spend this effort.
Cheers, Oli