In many companies, executive management puts more trust in the HR management than other sectors of the org. I speculate it’s for a number of reasons: HR is often the most easily subverted department, needing far less objectivity than departments related to brass tacks product development, IT, customer service, etc. So HR can most easily be a yes-man that executives like to hear from. Also while there certainly are domain-specific properties of HR work that require training and experience, there are also relatively more things handled in HR that are understandable to a layperson with no specialized knowledge in that space, perhaps inviting executives to feel like they are contributing more directly when engaging with HR.
Whatever the causes might be, one big effect is that HR usually gets to spin stories about turnover and recruiting to create perceptions such as
- nobody could possibly have done anything to prevent a critical employee from leaving
- despite some critical person leaving, nobody did anything wrong and if they hired the same person again they should handle everything the same way.
- there are just not enough candidates (to disguise the real issue that compensation and benefits are not competitive)
- the employee we need has to be open-minded, but we’re only seeing dogmatic people in the pipeline and/or the ubiquitous “not a good culture fit” feedback, to disguise the problem that the company itself is dogmatic and closed-minded, and candidates react to perceived dogmatic culture by turning down interviews or offers.
And many more.
In other words, HR will spin the situation to say that no productivity is lost to turnover, that nothing could have been done to maintain that productivity, and that whatever happens is never due to misaligned compensation or management failures, it’s just an unchangeable cost of doing business.