Are HR managers responsible for poor selection of candidates?
Monday, 11 August 2014 00:00
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This interesting question was shared amongst HR professionals and the opinions were diverse. Good reading, as HR is the most important strategic function of any organisation.
Question?
Are HR managers responsible for poor selection and performance of candidates in a company? What is the responsibility of an HR manager?
Opinion of some of the respondents, names of the respondents and companies are withheld due to confidentiality. These are just extracts from responses and are not to be understood as right or wrong.
Interesting question indeed – good reading for all managers/decision makers including HR professionals:
Corporate recruitment strategy and processes should be well known by all HR members and hiring managers. Candidates need to be assessed on both their technical (or professional) skills and also on their behavioural skills. This is what is called: competency based assessment. Further assessments are required if necessary. Recruitment can be external (when searching candidates from outside the current employees in your company) and/or internal (when you open the new vacancy internally to your existing employees).
HR’s responsibility also is to keep all stakeholders involved in discussions and decisions and to update them on the progress.
As for the authority, this varies from one organisation to the other but if we ask what HR’s authority in this area ‘should be’: to be able to assess, provide professional objective feedback and to make a decision based on combined technical and behavioural assessments and shortlist or reject a candidate.
Subjective decisions/arbitrary nominations only lead to wrong people in the wrong place, decreasing team productivity and increasing turnover. In all cases, this affects the company’s cost effective solutions.
Indeed the question is interesting, but the answer is purely depending on the authority vested on the HR Manager.
I know a lot of companies where the HR manager’s position is for taking blames, means not empowered adequately in terms of recruitment and policy, decision taking etc. If the GM selects a candidate and insists that he/she needs the candidate how can the HR Manager be blamed? Similarly line managers also bring in their choice where HR may not have authority to reject them. If the HR manager is adequately empowered in terms of selection and recruitment of the candidate and the HRM is experienced and qualified enough to do the job the question will not arise.
3. I feel HR managers must take the responsibility for poor selection and poor
performance if the company business plans, management and leadership are aligned inline with market best practices and/or benchmarks. Yes, no matter what’s going on, HR is HR, and still responsible.
HR manager has the onus of ensuring that the right candidate is hired, provided he has adequate level of autonomy in his role. For recruitment, a simple process needs to followed by asking a few questions ‘Why, What, How Much’ – which in textual terms is job analysis, job description, job evaluation. Also of equal importance is induction and training, many ignore this aspect and then at times, the newbee is not able to deliver. Well, I strongly believe, nobody is useless, unless you make him to be.
Once I was called to a very reputed company for a ‘recruitment manager vacancy’, the interviewers were the HR Director and the Recruitment Assistant Manager.
The first is not an HR professional by background, he/she was a doing great job in the company but in a totally different area, so was internally moved to head HR where there were performance issues!
I am a recruitment professional since several years and could have brought loads of learning to this company starting from improving the recruitment performance, manage the relationship with the managers (I understood they have a lot of frustration in the relationship HR – management and vice versa), turn around, costs, systems, impact of recruitment and proper selection on overall company performance, aligning with company’s strategy, increasing the performance and motivation of recruiters, highlighting the importance of competencies’ gap analysis and how it improves ROI on training and development (and/or talent management) function, etc... loads of benefits I could have brought to this company but unfortunately, they decided to lose me!
Who’s fault is it?
I don’t blame the two employees, no matter how junior or senior they are. I blame the ignorance of the decision makers who put these two people on these chairs and asked them to bring in a recruitment manager.
Leadership in any area causes a lot of damage to the company. HR these days is the business partner – we need to understand that a proper people management starts with selection and recruitment (be it internal transfer or external hire).
Continued next week
