They must not, however, be given authority over who to hire and fireIt's not obvious to me that this is what actually happened here.
I worked for many years at an organisation that had a similar policy - if I wanted to hire someone that the psych evaluation had flagged as no-hire, then I needed the approval of my boss's boss.
HR didn't invent that policy on their own. They recommended it to the CEO/Management Team because they saw the number of bad hires that were coming up where the hiring manager ignored the psych eval and then all the issues that the eval predicted came true.
I didn't love the rule - particularly when the issue was something like this person you're trying to hire for a relatively boring entry level role doesn't have a lot of ambition or initiative - but it was a specific response to an identified problem. Perhaps the wrong response, perhaps not, I'm still not sure.
But what it wasn't, was an HR dept that set their own rules. Their authority was purely to enforce the CEO's decisions on hiring policy.
Because the author of this article doesn't seem to know much about the origin/nature of the policy in his organisation, it's hard to tell whether he ran into the CEO's rule, or HR's rule.
The decision to give the test in English to someone who wasn't a native English speaker is a mistake, but it might be the candidate's mistake.
My organisation gave candidates the choice of language in which to take the test, and strongly advised them to take it in their native language. Every so often we'd see someone who didn't listen to that (possibly because they didn't want us to think that they weren't confident in their english skills) and it showed.
Based on the information provided in the blog post, I'm still not sure whether the wrong decision was made or not. There were clearly mistakes in the process, but we don't know who made them, and there's no way to know whether the psych eval was accurate or not since the hire never went ahead.