Should HR Be Responsible For Hiring?

In many companies the answer to this question is, “Yes.” I believe that this is the wrong answer. HR may be accountable for  hiring and working with managers to provide candidates, but responsibility for hiring is not HR’s. Especially since the vast majority of companies don’t even have an HR function so what would they do if HR is responsible for hiring?

The only person in the company responsible for hiring is the CEO. They are responsible for everything that happens in the company. Remember back to management 101A in college, you can delegate authority but you can’t delegate responsibility. The CEO can’t delegate the responsibility for hiring in the company to HR or anyone else. Since hiring often fails, many CEOs want to blame HR, but the CEO needs to take responsibility for the failures.

If the CEO decides that their company will be known for the best quality products in the industry, what happens to quality? If the CEO decides that customer service will be the best in the industry, what happens to customer service? If the CEO decides hiring top talent is critical to the company’s success, what happens with hiring?

Too often when I speak with CEOs they just accept hiring failure. They give many different reasons from we can’t afford top talent to we just can’t find good people. However, they wouldn’t do this for quality or customer service. The fact is companies don’t have to accept poor hiring. All they need to do is the same thing they would do to improve quality or customer service; define hiring standards, develop an effective process, train people, re-enforce the standards and hold people accountable. Obviously the first three steps are the keys to successful hiring.

The CEO needs to step up and make sure that there is an effective hiring process in place and that competent and well trained people are using the process. Then hold managers and HR accountable to a standard of performance, just like they do with any process in their organization.

Hiring responsibility belongs with the CEO. Once they decide that hiring failure will not be tolerated and put a process and well trained people in place, then they can delegate the authority to HR for managing the hiring process.