HR Conundrum: Hire or Fire?

In the past, HR played a substantial role in the hiring and firing of professionals, from assisting in the search for potential leaders to embodying the organization's efforts to attract top talent. Today, it's no different with a few and very less important responsibilities. Over the years, large companies have drastically reduced the size and importance of HR by relegating their task to supporting leadership's competitive strategy; supplying the company with human capital to outperform the Industry and assisting with the marketing of the company brand. "Sounds familiar" but it's quite different now, as the human element involving personal recruitment, talent evaluation and the subjective interview are now performed by "software!" With executive searches conducted by a select few and high-powered Executive Search Firms, HR's job is to support the written company policy and exepedite restructuring initiatives through the common layoff. Even the mid-level professional manager job posts are off-limits to HR, as Directors and VP's hand-select favorites from a short list of seemingly non-threatening "personal successors." Many of the managerial job openings are posted with the preferred candidate in-mind where HR's role in most cases, is to ensure the formality of the candidate search process. Typically, leaders make candidate selections off-premise favoring and in cases personally developing successors months, if not years prior to the job posting. So, is there a real chance at impressing HR representatives? I would say "yes!" How important is it to do so? Not so much, now-a-days. Someone once gave me professional advice that was very important, he said " Never submit for candidacy for a professional position without knowing someone!" I thought but was immediately provided the answer "they're all wired!"