Are IBM and Other Large Companies Capable of Hiring the Best People?

I've been an Executive Recruiter for over 14 years now, and it simply amazes me how ‘out of touch', many of the larger technology companies can get, when it comes to recruiting the best people to work for them.  Over the years, many are so focused on letting HR do all the hiring, ‘missing the boat’ with complex or inefficient hiring practices, designed to save costs, rather than hire the best people.  All this, while some of their smaller or mid-sized competition are swooping in and hiring top talent, beating them to the punch.  Can a company as large at IBM compete for the best talent in the industry?  What will it take for them and other large companies to compete for that top 10% of the talent pool?
In many ways, the answer to my question is quite rhetorical in nature.  The simple answer is IBM has a hiring model that is not focused on hiring top people but, just hiring people that can deal with large company bureaucracy.  How can this be?  By letting HR and Internal Recruiting dictate the hiring policies, they make it impossible for any hiring manager to bring the top people in, unless they're prepared to fight for a specific candidate and deal with countless political squabbles.  This is a great example of HR running the company, rather than the line managers who know what they want.  So, let's use a specific example with IBM.  As soon as you are granted the opportunity to work with IBM as an outside recruiting organization, you receive a call from HR, detailing the IBM recruiting policy.  The first thing they tell you is that you are not allowed to talk to any hiring manager at IBM and if you do, you will have your contract canceled.  Well, there's a great start right?  They then go on to say how you will obtain access to the IBM Hiring Portal and you must submit candidates specifically for a req. and nothing else.  So, what they're telling you is read the req., find a candidate based on the req. and take a guess if those candidates can fit the profile, without any direct input from the hiring manager.  The major problem, with this system is as a recruiter, you can't use your professional experience to guide both the candidate and hiring manger to a perfect fit, and you are simply forced to guess.  Another example using IBM, is how many calls we get from IBM managers, frustrated that their internal recruiters are so inept and a waste of time, yet, they can’t do anything about it. This goes back to IBM’s policy of keeping the external recruiters and hiring managers at a distance so HR can retain control of the process.  It seems IBM and other companies with this type of policy want to retain so much control, creativity and strategic hiring are thrown out the window.  If a top performer happens to pop-up, without a req. attached, the recruiter can’t submit that person because, well, there is no req. attached.  Seems kind of funny, if you think about it.  In my experience, sometimes the top candidates don’t show up when you have the req. but when they make a choice to move to another company.  The best organizations need to be prepared to hire those individuals at anytime, or their competition will hire them away instead.  IBM’s policy is so rigid, it won’t allow for candidates outside the policy and that’s the worst hiring strategy.
Now, there are large companies that treat hiring differently from IBM, with an understanding of how to hire the best people.  Let’s take Oracle for example. While Oracle’s HR department works on lowering recruiting costs, they allow all hiring managers to choose which recruiters they work with, and allow the managers direct access to any hiring method.  This gives the actual line manager the opportunity to work on a hiring strategy with both internal and external recruiters, making sure they can hire the best people.  They are also allowed a certain override if they come across a top candidate, with no actual req. open.  This is why Oracle has consistently been able to attract top people, even though they are also a very large organization. So, why is IBM different from Oracle?  It has to do with who’s running the business.  At IBM, HR runs the business and at Oracle, the managers run the business.
So, what is the perfect balance to both cut costs and hire the best people?  Allowing hiring managers direct contact with all recruiting sources, and include HR to guide and become part of the process not control it, the company ends up with direct input from hiring managers who know exactly what they want, recruiters that are able to plan a strategy with the organization and candidates that are well-informed throughout the process. It’s seems so logical and easy, yet organizations like IBM’s HR department and others like them, won’t give up any control.