I personally know of a case where someone got rejected because they asked for too much compared to his previous salary, even though the person who got hired was offered more money(but it was a smaller increase percentage wise over his previous job).
Basically guy was brilliant in the interview, engineering team said they want him, but HR rejected him because he said he wants 80k, while he was making 60k previously(he worked outside of London before). HR instead hired a guy who interviewed much worse, but he only asked for an increase of 5k(from 90k to 95k).
Well, there's the problem right there. HR should only have relatively minimal input into the hiring process, unless it's hiring someone in HR. Fail a background check, and I can understand HR vetoing a hire; asking for too much salary should be between the candidate, the hiring manager and their available budget.
Yeesh, that's super depressing. Not that I know anything about running HR departments, but that betrays such basic inability to uh, think that I can't really imagine how that could be ubiquitous.
I really think HR is a job that nobody should ever do full time. It should be a responsibility that is only ever allocated to someone who has another job to do - ideally someone who has to deal personally with the consequences of HR idiocracy.
Amongst the worst HR practice now is 'keyword searching' CV's against a job spec by people who have no idea what those terms mean.
An acquaintance told me he saw a downturn in contract work offers due to X qualification becoming widespread in his sector. He changed his CV to say 'I don't have X but..' and found traffic returned to normal!
