Haven't really done your homework.
Not too long ago we had a recruiter mouth off, tell the assembled techies they were useless because they couldn't write a CV just the way he liked it. Turns out just about every recruiter wants it slightly differently. And it goes way downhill from there.
Me, I think the jobs market is highly inefficient, not least caused by recruiters, but HR is equally guilty. Regularly you see adverts asking for more years of experience in a technology than said technology exists. The very fact this can happen means a massive disconnect in hiring.
It's worse than that. A good unix generalist will take most any unix and make it dance in no time. Yet hiring is usually after a specific flavour and a specific version. A generalist versed in database technology could equally well learn, and learn quickly, to adapt to something new like hadoop, and maybe in a while we'll see different technologies building on the same ideas; perchance we'll invent something that'll do for big data what unix does for operating a system and small data while at it. This isn't chauvinism; pipes and filters are a bit primitive but general enough to get by for most small data related tasks (and tricks like "xml" are actually not that helpful an idea there). Other systems focus on other things. Want a whole store of cookie-cutter type apps with an eye-candy interfaces? You know where to find it.
Anyhow. Technology generalists have their place, even if they're hard to assess. And, of course, because it often takes quite a bit of time for someone to grok the underlying patterns in computing and become that generalist. "Hiring" is still looking for cookie-cutter people, preferrably young ones that can be thrown at the problem like hardware. So I submit that most HR people and their "best practices", like the execs letting them go about it in that way, are as outdated and as useless any random tech recruiter. Knowledge work really is different from factory work. So sorry. Of course I'm biased, and by now I'm too bitter to find employment ever again. But that doesn't change that even the hiring process is far less about skills than about, well, doing what dogs do when they meet: Sniff each other. See if the new guy would fit in.
And that too is important. Some people get very petty when you don't, even if they ought to know better. (Telling people who work double your hours for less than half your pay they're "not committed" does not earn you brownie points, you silly veep, you.) But it is still more important to get the thing done. You want high expertise? You find it, you train it, you make do with generalists, all of the above. Bitching about it been done, never helped. Fire some of those useless chair 'taters in HR, get rid of your recruiter chums, git off yer arse and try again. And if you fail, well, that too is part of entrepeneurship, now innit?