I applaud this guy. Instead of berating his shortcomings in execution I think smart people should ponder the bigger question he posits, ie, why are smart people not capable of bypassing the eternal "ooh! ooh! pick me!" game of the HR folks? Seriously, HR reminds me of Morgana's forrest of the damned in Excalibur, ie, "No Knights shall pass this morass".
Here are 2 true stories from personal experience:
(1) Me and girlfriend are out to dinner with her friend when her friend's friend/associate/something phoned to say she was nearby and wanted to join us. She worked in HR. Fast forward past the wine and stuff to the end of the night where she was recounting a story about how she and her colleagues spent most of the time "printing out resumes for review" only to wind up throwing them all in the shredder because of the dauntingly massive volume and lack of coherent approach to dealing with it, deleting the responses to the original job postings and going to their supervisors and telling them they need they needed to "post more ads" and "call more recruiters" because they "couldn't find qualified candidates".
(2) Another HR person (I presumed) I overheard in a barnes and noble talking on the phone to somebody about how she found someone to "channel the job posting responses to a database" ... several moments later (I could only guess the other side of the cell conversation): "I don't know, I guess somebody somewhere looks at the resumes, whatever, they don't pay me enough to give a sh@#".
(3) Applicant side: A pretty damn talented guy I knew couldn't find work for about a year and a quarter. Social proof effects started kicking in until I realized that for all practical reasons he SHOULD be getting a job quite easily. A mutual friend suggested he try to "hire himself" from a HR standpoint to see if things looked different from the other side. After a very long attempt to figure out why, he hired a detective/consultant who found out the type of companies that he applied to in his area started using a particular firm for background checks, and that firm in turn used a service that searched for "probability" quotients that job applicant names were on various lists.
Not ACTUAL matches, mind you, but relative "probabilities" based on letters and letter combinations in name that his name would be on, say, federal databases of felons.
In his case, the match returned with a "moderate to high probability" that, in essence, names like his MAY be on federal lists of felons and people who had to register as sex offenders. And people who had restraining orders against them.
None of this applied to him, but his name "configuration" had, based on I don't know what criteria, a "probability" of being on such list.
Along with, I don't know, thousands of other people who had short, basic anglo-saxon names.
And, of course, there's that infamous YouTube video from 2007 with that law firm advising HR managers at some hotel conference about how to "setup a fax machine near a shredder" to comply with federal hiring laws and then complain to government that they couldn't find qualified candidates in order to score government handouts, tax-breaks and make the case for more temporary visas to take advantage of foreigners who don't realize just how expensive it can be to work in the U.S. and think $30-40k is like hitting the jackpot based on relative buying power back home.