Under pressure: How HR should push back on questionable hires

Recent findings at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and OC Transpo are putting a spotlight on the perils of senior leaders who push for hires that do not meet established requirements — and the pressure facing HR in those moments.

At IRCC, former deputy minister Christiane Fox “used the weight of her position” to champion an acquaintance for a management role, despite internal HR concerns that he did not meet merit criteria and lacked required experience and bilingual skills.

In Ottawa, an investigation found OC Transpo used appointments to fill management vacancies where candidates “did not meet the education or the experience requirement of the position” and were screened in without meeting minimum qualifications, practices the auditor said “undermine the job evaluation process” and “create unfairness and inequity within staffing processes.”

For HR leaders caught between codified staffing rules and heavy-handed colleagues, these cases underline how hard it can be to hold the line on an inappropriate hire. But there are ways to push back, say two academics speaking to Canadian HR Reporter.

‘Perfect storm’ for unfortunate decisions

In these two cases, it appears there was documentation, which suggests “the pressure from leadership to override those processes was really strong,” says Samantha Hancock, assistant professor in the DAN Department of Management and Organizational Studies at Western University.

“It’s not necessarily that HR didn’t do their job — they were probably trying really hard to do their job — but these other pressures from above can override that.”

Those pressures can be compounded by hierarchy, perceived power differences, time constraints and budget pressures that stretch HR thin, says Hancock.

“It can be an interaction of all these factors that can create a perfect storm for making unfortunate decisions,” she says, particularly when leaders want a quick decision.

Then it comes out later that these processes weren’t followed and HR gets blamed, says Hancock, “but, really, they weren’t given the support and the latitude that they needed to do their job properly,” she says.

For Hancock, the tension that HR faces in these situations starts with competing expectations about its role.

“HR is supposed to be both a partner in the leadership process but also sort of safeguarding equity,” she says. “Sometimes those roles are really at odds, especially when they are being overruled or maybe challenged by someone in an authority position. So, trying to balance those things can be really tricky.”

Power disadvantage for HR

Part of the challenge is structural: Depending on the organization, HR may start from a weaker position in the internal power hierarchy, according to Tiziana Casciaro, professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“I want to give a shout-out to HR, because sometimes what looks like not having a backbone is simply an outcome of being in a power-disadvantaged position,” she says, adding that HR shares that fate with support functions that do not contribute directly to the bottom line.

This can make HR functions often look marginal in terms of their contribution or relevance to what the organization is trying to do, says Casciaro.

“It doesn't mean that that is a correct conclusion, because the support functions are essential also, but they are so in a way that is less visible to the uninformed eye, and they tend to have impact more in the long run than in the short term.”

As a result, HR cannot always push back well because they are seen as peripheral to the core, she says.

“HR is really facing headwinds when it comes to exercising influence in the organization.”

Understanding why leaders want a candidate

To resist pressure around an inappropriate hire, HR must build influence despite this disadvantage, says Casciaro, and that starts with a deep grasp of what the business is trying to achieve.

“The first one is to go to the fundamentals of what people are looking for, what motivates certain parts of the organization to hire a certain person that you, as an HR professional, know is the wrong person,” she says.

“You have to understand the business so well, you have to understand the interests of the people who want to do that hire, to understand why they want it.”

If, after that, the hire is still wrong for the position, HR “needs to articulate the downstream consequences of making that hire in a way that is compelling,” says Casciaro.

“Sometimes the people who want to do the hire are very confused. They don’t realize that there are consequences that are unclear to them that will come from hiring the wrong person for the role.”

In a nepotism scenario, HR cannot simply argue that the concept is bad in general, says Casciaro. Instead, HR must be more tangible and explain: “If you hire this person, and you are seen as hiring them for nepotistic reasons, these other parts of the organization will have this reaction to you. Your group will suffer in these ways,” she says, citing the need for data and precedents.

‘Borrowed backbone’ and coalition building

Even with strong arguments, HR may not be able to persuade a powerful manager or executive from pushing for an inappropriate hire. In those situations, Casciaro says HR shouldn’t go it alone.

“There are going to be times when your arguments are just not going to be enough,” she says, so HR needs to create coalitions with other groups and people in the organization who are aligned with your concern, including functions with profit-and-loss responsibility that are core to the organizational mission.

“It’s a borrowed backbone. You cannot grow your own because you simply are not in the right position to do so, but there are others in the organization who do have a very evident, direct contribution to the bottom line… who can exercise that kind of pressure,” says Casciaro.

“You orchestrate a persuasive argument with other parts of the organization that can come to your rescue, in a sense.”

Checks and balances in hiring

Stronger governance around who decides on a hire — and how close they are to the candidate or champion — is another protection, says Hancock.

“Usually there’s more than one person that has some sort of input on a hiring decision, so having those checks and balances is really important,” including clarity on who is on the hiring committee and who has authority to make the ultimate decision.

If someone is forwarding a resume of someone they want hired, the “degree of heavy handedness” is what becomes problematic, she says. “The ultimate hiring decisions should be like someone who is removed from that person so that there’s an objective… person who’s at arm’s length.”

When it comes to transparency, Hancock draws a line between neutral reporting and influence. She says it may be reasonable, depending on the organization, to give high-level updates after each stage — for example, how many candidates have progressed — as a courtesy to the leader pushing for the hire.

Should HR be more flexible?

Leaders sometimes insist that standards need to be relaxed because of a crisis or urgent operational need, as seen in both public cases, putting HR in the position of weighing flexibility against fairness and risk.

From a risk perspective, case-by-case exceptions around minimum qualifications are especially fraught, says Hancock: “It should really come back to ‘What are the requirements for the job and [does] this person meet those requirements?’” she says.

“If they’re not meeting those requirements and you can’t document that there’s a good reason why they’re not meeting those requirements, then I would say, no, HR is not necessarily… being too rigid.”

Ultimately, all the decisions in HR need to be legally defensible, says Hancock, which is why it’s so important to define the conflict-of-interest issues and whether there are going to be exceptions for bypassing competition processes: “[It’s about] trying to identify in advance what those conditions might be,” she says.

Casciaro says context does matter when it comes to exceptions, but it cannot be a blanket excuse: “It’s always a case-by-case approach, because you always have to position that decision in the larger context, and say, “Well, what are the circumstances that lead you to believe that this hire is necessary at this point in time?’”

If the context puts undue pressure on certain parts of the organization, HR should take it into consideration, she says — but that doesn't mean they should “cave” to stressed-out leaders pushing for one candidate.

“You have to always consider: Is the cost benefit of making such a hire plausible?” says Casciaro.

Sometimes people will make assumptions that a candidate will solve a pressing problem and, therefore, want to go around the usual standards or requirements, she says.

“That's when the HR professional has to come in and say, ‘You think you're solving a problem right now, but let me tell you all the reasons why, for your business, for the things you're trying to accomplish, this is not going to solve a damn thing. In fact, it could be counterproductive.’

“That's your job.”

After a bad hire: accountability and repair

If, despite best efforts, an inappropriate hire goes through and then causes damage to the organization — such as reduced morale or reputational harm — the burden should not fall solely on HR to clean it up, says Hancock.

“This is where senior leadership really should step in and take accountability for this type of issue because it wasn’t necessarily an HR failure so much as that balance… between being a partner in running the organization and then making sure things proceed fairly and ethically… just didn’t happen.”

Going forward, the best thing to do is to audit your process and see where things fell apart, she says, “and then try and reinforce or… rejig that process to make sure that it’s not going to happen again.”

Basically, all of this comes down to having good prior processes, says Hancock.

“HR processes need to be proactive, not reactive. All of this is reacting after a scandal. So, we want to avoid that in the first place and have the HR processes in place.”