If you are trying to hire a talented employee, and HR says no way, you better demand they justify it. It's your job to advocate for people on your team, even when they haven't come on board yet. Otherwise no one will.
It's far to easy for HR to auto-reject because of hard-wired criteria, they have no incentive to challenge their own rules for a good candidate.
I know a kid who once was a chip-runner at a casino. The way the job worked was he took cash/chips from poker players and went to the cage to get them chips/cash. He got paid minimum wage plus tips, and was on the hook if he got shorted. But the plus was he'd get $1 tip for each transaction, sometimes more.
But this kid optimized the whole job. He hustled like crazy, minimized cage trips by carrying 7 or 8 racks at a time, and even took optimal routes through the poker room. Watching him work was inspiring, the kid was so driven.
He was making a ton of money, far more than the other chip-runners, and someone ended up complaining. So the room decided chip-runners should pool all tips together. He quit in a rage the next day and chip-running service in the room became awful, the remaining chip-runners now saunter at their own pace, carry a single rack at a time and minimize their risk by slowly counting everything three times.
A couple years later the kid got busted for selling weed out of his house. He ended up serving a few years in prison. He's going to now fail any HR background check/screen. I'd still hire him in a fucking second, and expect him to rapidly work his way up from any entry level role.
