Why Managers Should Own Hiring—Not HR
A leadership story about power, accountability, and what hiring really reveals.
When the new marketing hire failed, no one was surprised—but no one stepped up either.
Her name was Elisa. Sharp résumé. Poised in interviews. HR loved her. She moved quickly through the pre-screen, sailed through the competency checklist, and aced her culture-fit round.
But six weeks into the role, her team was already strained. Not because she lacked skill—but because she lacked the wiring to thrive under pressure in that environment. She defaulted to consensus when the job demanded confrontation. She hesitated in ambiguity. And the creative director, who had only met her once during a ten-minute “final round,” didn’t know how to course-correct. Because he hadn’t hired her.
Human Resources had.
The Hidden Cost of a Polite Hiring System
The company in question—let’s call it Frame & Rise, a mid-stage tech startup—had scaled fast. And in their quest for fairness, they had centralized hiring into a structured, HR-led process. Every candidate was run through the same behavioral screening rubric. Managers were encouraged to “trust the process.” HR made the decisions on who moved forward to ensure “equity and consistency.”
The intention was noble.
The outcome was predictable.
Of 14 new hires brought in through this model in one fiscal quarter, 9 left within 12 months. Not because they were underqualified, but because they were misaligned. The team didn’t own the decision—and didn’t trust the result. They weren’t angry. Just disengaged.
And that’s the quieter cost of centralized hiring: it erodes trust not just in candidates, but in the system itself.
The Problem Isn’t HR—It’s the Displacement of Ownership
Let’s be clear. HR has a crucial role in hiring. Structuring the process. Ensuring legal defensibility. Building diverse pipelines. But the moment HR becomes the filter, the decider, or the voice of cultural alignment, it crosses an invisible line: it takes power without bearing consequence.
Leadership should never outsource the decision it’s most responsible for—the composition of its team.
Yet in many organizations, that’s exactly what happens. Interviews are delegated to HR, often because “managers don’t interview well.” That may be true—but it’s not an excuse. It’s an indictment. You don’t remove responsibility from leaders because they lack a skill. You train them until they’re capable of making the decisions their roles demand.
Because the person accountable for results must be the one who chooses the people who deliver them.
Otherwise, hiring becomes a performance of fairness, rather than a practice of leadership.
And when that happens, organizations don’t just make bad hires. They make unclaimed hires—people no one fully chooses, protects, or develops.
Case Study: A Manufacturer with a Process—and No Performance
In 2022, a regional manufacturing client—let’s call them Brixton Components—asked for help rebuilding their mid-management bench. Over the past year, they had hired six new operations leads, all selected through a rigorous HR-led process that emphasized company values, tenure, and risk aversion. The results? Chronic underperformance. Escalations increased. Team trust deteriorated.
Not one of the managers had been hired directly by the plant leads. HR had conducted all behavioral interviews, citing concerns that line managers “weren’t trained to assess soft skills.” What they missed was the single most important context: these roles required resilience under chaos, not just professionalism under calm.
The hiring system was polished.
The hires were wrong.
When we asked the plant leads what they would’ve done differently, one said bluntly:
"I would’ve hired someone who had been punched in the face by a deadline—and come back smarter."
The Structural Flaw in Letting HR Decide
This isn’t about HR doing a poor job. It’s about structural displacement.
The Ulrich Model (1997), which remains the dominant HR framework, segmented HR into Business Partners, COEs, and Shared Services—explicitly designed to align HR with business strategy without centralizing ownership (Ulrich, 1997). But in doing so, it decoupled accountability from proximity. Decisions were made by those removed from the pressure, and outcomes fell on those with no voice in the process.
This is still how most companies hire.
In fact, SHRM continues to emphasize standardized interviewing as a safeguard against legal exposure and unconscious bias (SHRM, 2023). But that focus on process over performance has a shadow side: it makes leaders passive. It teaches them to defer. To trust structure instead of judgment. To stay in their lane—even when that lane leads off a cliff.
What Real Hiring Looks Like
Great hiring is not a compliance activity. It’s not about how a candidate performs in a simulated setting. It’s about how they think, decide, and respond when things go sideways. That can’t be assessed through HR frameworks alone.
It takes real leadership presence in the room.
It takes skin in the game.
And yes—it takes courage.
That’s what we trained for a client in Alberta: a scale-stage energy startup with 70 employees and zero HR staff. Every hiring decision was made by the leader who would manage the role, supported by a hiring playbook we developed. They asked sharp, performance-oriented questions. They called references themselves. And they retained 95% of new hires over 18 months.
No HR department.
Just leadership ownership.
What HR Should Be Doing
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about removing HR. It’s about repositioning it.
HR should be the architect of the system—not the decider inside it.
Train leaders to interview for real performance.
Audit systems for bias, not candidates for fit.
Support clarity, not shield leadership from discomfort.
Because the moment HR becomes the one choosing who gets through the door, leaders stop building teams—and start inheriting problems.
Hire Like a Leader—Not Like a Process
If your managers rely on HR to screen candidates, make decisions, or “run point,” you don’t have a hiring process.
You have a liability shield.
It’s time to change that.
→ Train your managers to interview for outcomes, not optics.
Join the 90-minute seminar:
Behavioral Interviewing—How to Hire the Right Candidate Every Time
Practical, tactical, and unapologetically results-driven.
$199 | Includes 30-day replay access
Custom scorecards, scripts, and readiness tools included
For managers tired of hiring for politeness and missing performance
Final Thought
You don’t protect culture by controlling hiring through HR.
You protect it by building teams with leaders who own their people choices.
Because no matter how fair your process is, if no one is accountable for the result—it will fail.
And no one gets to blame the system when they refused to lead.
References
SHRM. (2023). Structured Interviewing Guidelines. Society for Human Resource Management. https://www.shrm.org
Ulrich, D. (1997). Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results. Harvard Business Review Press.