You Can’t Fix a Broken Hiring System Without Leadership

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You Can’t Fix a Broken Hiring System Without Leadership

by | Jun 8, 2025 | Assessment, Passive Candidate Recruiting, Recruiting & Closing

For more than two decades, Gallup has reported on the state of employee engagement in the U.S. The data has been remarkably consistent — and remarkably disheartening. As of 2024, only 31% of employees are engaged in their work, while 17% are actively disengaged. The line has barely moved since the early 2000s. We’ve had 25 years of quarterly warnings, yet we continue to see the same stagnant results.

This is not a data problem. It’s a leadership problem.

Gallup U.S. Employee Engagement Trend (2000–2024) Despite 25 years of data and widespread awareness, engagement levels have barely improved. Only 31% of employees are engaged while 17% are actively disengaged. The real question is not what the data says, but why HR leadership hasn’t acted on it.

Despite billions spent on HR technology, hiring systems have failed to evolve in ways that meaningfully improve performance, retention, or employee satisfaction – especially for mid-level professionals and managers. A recent research report, Root Cause Analysis: Why Hiring Systems Are Failing, highlights the same five core issues that have plagued organizations for years: 1) ill-defined jobs, 2) managers are the problem, 3) weak candidate pipelines, 4) hiring strategies that filter out strong talent instead of attracting it and 5) lack of HR’s ability to implement true business process change.

Josh Bersin says it. SHRM says it. All valid. All well-documented. And all still unresolved.

The question we should be asking isn’t what’s broken – we already know that. The question is, why hasn’t it been fixed?

The answer, uncomfortably, is that HR leadership has failed to lead. Instead of challenging the status quo, too many HR leaders have deferred to external vendors, defaulted to legal caution, or treated hiring as an administrative process rather than a strategic lever. As a result, decision-making around hiring has become fragmented, risk-averse, and performance-neutral. Managers are left to rely on “gut feel” because they haven’t been trained. Job descriptions remain vague because no one takes the time to define success. Recruiting is judged by efficiency metrics like time-to-fill instead of outcomes like quality of hire or first-year performance.

Meanwhile, the newest wave of excitement  – AI in HR – risks becoming another distraction.

Wrapping broken systems in smarter technology doesn’t solve the underlying issue. It often just hides it. An AI-powered ATS may rank candidates faster, but it still relies on the same flawed criteria. Automating unstructured interviews just gets you bad decisions faster. The promise of AI can only be realized if it’s applied to a structured, performance-aligned process. And most organizations don’t have that foundation in place.

There is no shortage of tools. What’s missing is the willingness to look in the mirror and admit that most companies still don’t have a hiring system that links how a person is recruited, assessed, and onboarded to how that person performs a year later. That disconnect is at the core of our ongoing engagement and retention failures.

An Idea Worth A/B Testing

One approach worth serious consideration is Performance-based Hiring. It’s not another tool or isolated fix. It’s a reengineering of the hiring process based on a simple idea: define on-the-job success first, then find people who can do that work. Instead of screening for credentials, PbH focuses on evidence of past performance doing similar work. It trains hiring managers to assess this performance consistently and helps recruiters position the role as a career move to the candidate. It doesn’t promise a magic solution – but it does offer a coherent framework that links hiring inputs to business outcomes.

Here’s why one top U.S. labor concluded that Performance-based Hiring is superior to existing hiring processes. In fact, he said this 10 years ago. But his advice was ignored, then. It shouldn’t be ignored now. This simple GPT will allow to you to convert any job into a performance profile in secondsand see the difference for yourself.

That said, we shouldn’t oversell it. The purpose of this conversation isn’t to promote one methodology, it’s to confront a bigger failure.

HR leaders need to stop chasing new tools and start fixing the system. They need to take ownership of hiring outcomes the same way finance owns budgets and operations owns productivity.

That starts by asking hard questions: Are our job descriptions meaningful? Are our managers capable of assessing talent objectively? Are we measuring success beyond time-to-fill? Are we willing to test new methods and hold ourselves accountable to results?

A smart next step for any organization would be to pilot a more rigorous approach – whether it’s Performance-based Hiring or another structured model  – on a few roles where success and failure can be measured clearly. But no pilot will matter if leadership isn’t willing to face the fact that what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. Not for a year. Not for 25 years.

There’s no new app or AI algorithm that can replace this kind of leadership. Until HR leaders stop following and start leading, we’ll be stuck reading the same Gallup reports for another 25 years and wondering why nothing changes.

Small steps for moving forward with meaningful HR change