Every department head on our leadership team complains about vacant positions and slow hiring, but none of them will accept accountability for Talent Acquisition on the Accountability Chart. How do we place an orphaned recruiting seat when our HR seat only handles payroll and benefits?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An orphaned seat occurs when accountability is either so broad that everyone claims it is not their job, or so painful that no one wants the friction. Talent Acquisition is the classic orphan in growing companies. Operations, Sales, and Marketing demand headcount, but they expect qualified candidates to appear on their calendars without doing the sourcing work, while traditional HR treats the role purely as compliance and benefits administration.

In the EOS framework, you cannot leave a seat unassigned, and you cannot place two names in one box. You must solve this at your next quarterly session using the IDS process.

First, isolate Talent Acquisition from basic HR compliance on the Accountability Chart. Define the five core roles for a distinct Talent Acquisition seat:
- Sourcing qualified candidate pipelines
- Candidate screening against Core Values
- Managing the hiring and interview pipeline
- Candidate experience and offer coordination
- Hiring Scorecard measurables like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire

Second, determine where this seat reports. Sourcing talent is fundamentally an outbound marketing and operational capability. If your company lacks the budget for a full-time internal recruiter, the seat must temporarily roll up under the Integrator or whichever operational leader bears the highest hiring volume. One person on the leadership team must hold the box as an additional seat.

Holding the seat does not mean doing all the resume screening manually. It means being accountable for building the candidate engine, whether that means deploying modern AI sourcing workflows, engaging contract recruiters, or standardizing interview rubrics. The department heads can execute interviews, but one single leader owns the pipeline measurables.