If execs supposedly want hiring to be analytical, why does HR own it?

Just read this article. I mostly like Cade Massey’s work (UPenn), but that article was largely infuriating drivel that hopefully many managers knew 10 years ago. It’s about “hiring” and “predicting success” and of course it only mentions stuff like Moneyball (that book came out in 2002) and “tech product managers,” because apparently that’s all we hire for anymore, even though the economy is 50%+ retail. These takes get tedious.

The problem is that all these biz journalism articles about hiring make assumptions that aren’t really true. They tend to assume, writ large, that:

• Executives want hiring to be analytical: Sure, in the sense that executives are probably often comfortable looking at spreadsheets, which they think of as “data” (the two are different in many respects; spreadsheets are usually observable numbers put together by task monkeys, and to make that into “data,” you need a level of strategy and analysis that most executives honestly lack). But if they really wanted an analytical hiring process, why would HR have anything to do with hiring? HR is typically the least-analytical department in a biz. I did a MA-HRIR program from 2012 to 2014 and whenever we had a stats project, 17 people broke out in hives.
• Executives even care about hiring: Senior leaders tend to…