Hard to Measure, Easy to Blame

Chapter 7 argued hiring can be redesigned. That's true, and it's still worth doing. But there's a harder, messier problem sitting underneath the design one, and it's worth naming before moving on to who profits from nothing changing.

The CEO Who Fired HR

Every so often a CEO says something like this out loud, and gets applauded for it instead of questioned. In May 2026, Bolt's CEO Ryan Breslow told a Fortune summit he'd fired the company's entire HR department, saying it was "creating problems that didn't exist" and that those problems disappeared once the team was gone. It's not an isolated stunt, either; "I fired HR and things got better" has become its own recurring genre of viral founder post, and Bolt's is just the clearest, most-covered example of it. Job seekers have their own version of the same complaint, from the other direction: the large majority never get any real feedback on why they were rejected, no transparency, no explanation, just silence (see Chapter 6). Somewhere between those two complaints sits a real question nobody quite answers. Why does this keep happening to HR specifically, and not to marketing, or sales, or product?

The Marketing Version of the Same Problem

I don't think it's actually specific to HR. I spent years as a marketing leader, and I know the other side of this pattern firsthand. When sales misses a number, one of the first places blame goes is marketing: the leads were bad, the messaging was off, marketing isn't delivering. That fight has a name in B2B, the MQL/SQL handoff, and it's well-documented: misaligned marketing and sales teams lose up to 60% of leads in that handoff, and on average 87 of every 100 marketing-qualified leads never become a sales-qualified one. Marketing's actual contribution to a closed deal is real and usually significant, and it's also hard to isolate from everything else that happens between a lead and a signed contract. That combination, real value plus hard attribution, makes any function an easy target the moment someone's looking to cut. It's not a personal failing of marketers or HR people. It's what happens to any team whose output doesn't reduce to one clean number the way a closed deal or a shipped feature does.

Why HR Seems to Get It Worse

HR seems to get it worse, more often, and more publicly than most, though I want to be honest that this is a pattern I've observed, not a comparative statistic, I couldn't find research that actually measures HR against other functions on this. A few real reasons compound instead of standing alone. Its own headline metrics, time-to-fill, time-to-hire, don't obviously connect to revenue the way a sales number does, so its defense sounds soft even when the underlying work is real. A hiring manager can often judge their own domain directly, a marketing leader knows a good marketer, a sales leader knows a good salesperson, so in that one specific moment, the moment of judging fit, HR's distinct contribution is less visible than it is in negotiation, compliance, candidate experience, or process design, the parts of the job that never show up in a single hiring decision. And HR is disproportionately the function delivering the bad news: the rejection, the policy, the layoff. People remember who said no more than they remember who built the process that led there. None of that adds up to HR being unnecessary. It adds up to HR being unusually hard to see clearly, from either side.

The People Actually Paying For This

I'm not trying to settle whether HR is essential, and I don't think that's the useful question. What I do think is true: a function that's constantly having to justify its own existence has less room for the parts of the job that take time and care, transparency, real feedback, actually reading the person behind the page. That slack doesn't come out of a CEO's schedule when it gets cut. It comes out of the process job seekers are standing in the middle of, the same silence, the same black-box rejections, the same "not a good fit" with nothing behind it, that the rest of this thesis has already described. Whatever you believe about why HR gets treated this way, the people actually paying for that argument are rarely in the room when it's being made.