We examine whether centralized hiring (in this study, by the head office of a US retail chain) or decentralized hiring (by store managers) leads to higher quality employee-company matches. While centralized hiring can ensure that enough resources are invested in consistently hiring people aligned with company values, it can also neglect the unit managers’ knowledge about which individuals would best match local conditions. We use difference-in-differences analyses to examine the effects of a switch from decentralized hiring to centralized hiring at our research site. We find that, on average, centralized hiring does not increase the quality of employee-company matches (measured through employee departures of newly-hired employees, store-level employee turnover, and store performance) except when store managers are inexperienced and/or overly busy. Yet, we find that centralized hiring is associated with higher employee departure rates in stores where the manager is likely to be more informed than headquarters (e.g. in stores that are far from headquarters or that serve repeat customers).