Is HR responsible for hiring? In many companies the answer to this question is, "Yes." I believe that is the wrong answer. HR may be responsible for facilitating hiring, working with manager 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. So the CEO can't delegate to HR or anyone else the responsibility for hiring in the company. Since hiring often fails many CEO's want to blame HR, but they need 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 CEO's they just accept hiring failure. For many different reasons from can't afford top talent to just can't find good people. Yet 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 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 and the responsibility to the CEO.

The CEO needs to step up and make sure 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 these steps are in place then they can delegate the authority to HR for managing the hiring process. If more CEO''s would take the same responsibility for hiring as they do for other processes within their company, hiring accuracy would dramatically improve and hiring failure would be a thing of the past.

I welcome your thoughts and comments. Brad

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