Welcome to HR outsourcing
Disney doesn't even do their own initial selection, they use a software package and "software as a service" called Recruitmax to do their initial screening/selection. Now Taleo, a similar company has bought the owner of Recruitmax (Vurv). If you take the full demo of Recruitmax you will see that the VERY FIRST benefit they mention is that it protects you from descrimination lawsuits and other EEO traps. Next it uses a technique of "neuro-linguistic" analysis to determine you personality from your writing style (of course this assume you wrote your own resume, ooops) and to determine your fit. (Big surprise, it prefers people from the southeast, just like it's writers) The, third, it uses key word matching to determine anything that might exclude you, and then finally, using its keyword matching once again, it sees if your experience matches and best guess if you meet the minimum requirements. Once it selects the top XX matches it passes those on to the Disney HR person for your resume's first encounter with human eyes, after washing it of any clues that might later lead to EEO actions of course. Now here's the best part, for the first several steps it uses the same criteria for Disney, Children's hospital, HP, IBM, Dow Chemical, City of Chicago, and a myriad of other companies. Disney most likely uses this method first and foremost because it is a safe choice. Years ago, the the days of Ma Bell and right after divestiture, people always chose AT&T, because it was the safe choice, many consultants always pick IBM because it is the safe choice rather then risk their careers on taking a chance with better/newer technology from a less know source. Hiring someone who came from another large fortune 100 company is likewise a safe choice. No one will ever question an HR person for hiring a person who was "successful at Coke" regardless of how awful they do at Disney, conversely, if they hired a person from off the reservation and the person turned out awful, there would be questions about "how could you have made that hiring decision?". Sadly the safe choice is usually the choice that will lead to the mundane.
In answer to your question, yes I tend to agree with your posit that this is something that is wrong, but sadly with a lot more than Disney.
Disney doesn't even do their own initial selection, they use a software package and "software as a service" called Recruitmax to do their initial screening/selection. Now Taleo, a similar company has bought the owner of Recruitmax (Vurv). If you take the full demo of Recruitmax you will see that the VERY FIRST benefit they mention is that it protects you from descrimination lawsuits and other EEO traps. Next it uses a technique of "neuro-linguistic" analysis to determine you personality from your writing style (of course this assume you wrote your own resume, ooops) and to determine your fit. (Big surprise, it prefers people from the southeast, just like it's writers) The, third, it uses key word matching to determine anything that might exclude you, and then finally, using its keyword matching once again, it sees if your experience matches and best guess if you meet the minimum requirements. Once it selects the top XX matches it passes those on to the Disney HR person for your resume's first encounter with human eyes, after washing it of any clues that might later lead to EEO actions of course. Now here's the best part, for the first several steps it uses the same criteria for Disney, Children's hospital, HP, IBM, Dow Chemical, City of Chicago, and a myriad of other companies. Disney most likely uses this method first and foremost because it is a safe choice. Years ago, the the days of Ma Bell and right after divestiture, people always chose AT&T, because it was the safe choice, many consultants always pick IBM because it is the safe choice rather then risk their careers on taking a chance with better/newer technology from a less know source. Hiring someone who came from another large fortune 100 company is likewise a safe choice. No one will ever question an HR person for hiring a person who was "successful at Coke" regardless of how awful they do at Disney, conversely, if they hired a person from off the reservation and the person turned out awful, there would be questions about "how could you have made that hiring decision?". Sadly the safe choice is usually the choice that will lead to the mundane.
In answer to your question, yes I tend to agree with your posit that this is something that is wrong, but sadly with a lot more than Disney.