There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate. None. It should be inconceivable, at a technical company, to hand over that much hiring power to a non-technical person. HR people are valuable in a company. But their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers, and to take care of all the stuff like W-2 forms and whatnot nobody wants to deal with, not make…
Well, HR does have final say-so in terms of logistics. Like does the candidate require sponsorship to work in this country, do they have a criminal record, did their reference say they were an asshole, are they asking for more money than we can afford. Even judging personality and communication skills is not outside their expertise. The lesson of this article is to not use personality tests.
They should not have final say over a candidate based on personality or communications skills. They should be a source of input (i.e. this guy is an asshole, because he was very rude to the guy who helped him scheduled his callback interview, or perhaps more importantly to inject some company-wide context into what can turn into a group-specific analysis) but it's the technical people who know what kind of communication goes on in a technical team, and thus it's the technical people who should evaluate a candidate on that characteristic. Yes, this requires trusting your technical people and investing them with a greater responsibility to understand the dynamics of their work group. That's a good thing.