Accountability sinks

I was thinking about something similar today. Sometimes accountability can be a blocker, for example for hiring.

If you have 1 candidate, it's an easy call, if you have 3 candidates, you evaluate in less than a week. If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.

You can't evaluate all the information and make an informed decision, the optimal strategy is to flip a 100 sided die, but no one is going to be on the hook for that.

> If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.

That's not how accountability works, in the traditional sense.

What you described is Person A (accountable for hiring) hiring person B (responsible for screening and evaluating candidates). Person A is still accountable for the results of Person B. If Person B hired a sh*t candidate, it still lands on Person A for not setting up an adequate hiring system.

Being accountable for something doesn't forbid you from delegating to other people. It is very common for 1 person to be accountable for multiple people's work.

heh never works that way. an experienced bureucrat like you describe always has a shit-deflecting canopy. so whatever decisions he personally took are never attributable to him personally.

it just so happened.