It’s Time to Rethink—and Possibly Retire—Traditional HR Departments

It’s Time to Rethink

The Gatekeepers of Talent Are Also the Architects of Crisis

In a country like India, where the demographic dividend is both a promise and a pressure, the question of why so many qualified individuals remain unemployed—while companies continue to lay off talent in waves—demands serious scrutiny. The usual scapegoats are economic downturns, automation, or performance. But let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What if the problem lies at the very gates of the corporate world—within the HR departments themselves?

HR’s Unseen Hand in a Broken System

Human Resources was originally meant to be the heart of a company’s people strategy. But today, it’s more like a bloated firewall—filtering out innovation, creativity, and diversity through archaic systems riddled with cognitive bias, conformity, and outdated metrics.

From resume-based filtering to hiring by brand name rather than raw talent, HR’s bias-driven recruitment is no longer just inefficient—it’s dangerous. The wrong hires become liabilities, and the missed hires? Potential unicorns lost to the void.

Campus HR: The Silent Partners in Crime

And this systemic failure doesn’t start in the boardroom—it starts right at the college level. Campus placement HR teams in universities and B-schools have morphed into middlemen rather than mentors. Their role has been reduced to “coordinating drives” rather than ensuring talent alignment and career readiness.

They obsess over placement numbers to impress accreditors and boards, not over quality of match or long-term employability. Students are filtered not by capability but by CGPA cut-offs, English fluency, or arbitrary behavioral tests that predict nothing about real-world performance.

In short: Campus HR departments have become enablers of the broken corporate HR pipeline. They're just as complicit in perpetuating a flawed model that values surface-level polish over deep potential.

Who Should Be Accountable for Mass Layoffs?

Let’s talk accountability. The sweeping layoffs across MNCs operating in India—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, Capgemini, TCS—weren’t acts of God. They were results of strategic hiring gone wrong.

If HR—both at campuses and in corporations—had recruited based on alignment, skill trajectory, and adaptability instead of checkbox culture, would we see these many pink slips? Would we be losing revenue, morale, and time trying to fix what HR should have got right from day one?

The Real Cost of HR's Mistakes

Every bad hire doesn’t just cost money. It blocks a more deserving candidate. It erodes team efficiency. It contributes to attrition, disengagement, and underperformance—eventually forcing companies to make mass layoffs and restructure.

Yet rarely do we question the root source: the people who let the wrong talent in and kept the right talent out.

What’s the Alternative?

We don’t need more HR departments. We need Talent Intelligence Systems. We need:

• AI-powered, bias-free recruitment engines

• Cross-functional hiring pods involving actual doers, not just screeners

• A complete reboot of college placement systems, making them design-led and skill-verified

• Continuous career mapping that aligns hiring with business evolution, not just short-term gaps

Let HR Take Responsibility—Or Step Aside

HR, as it stands, is no longer a neutral department. It is an impact center—for better or worse. If it continues to operate with old rules in a new world, it will keep damaging careers, businesses, and economies.

It’s time to call it out. Hold HR—both corporate and campus—accountable. If they won’t evolve, replace them with systems that will.

India’s talent is not the problem. The way we manage, measure, and mobilize it is. And until that changes, we’ll keep spinning in circles—laying off people we should have never hired, while ignoring the ones we should have bet on.