I have to say that I am in total agreement with you about the fact that the human touch offers one of the best ways to help select persons for a job.

However, I dont think the process has to be binary, i.e., either all automated or all human. Rather I see most online tools as a way to help humans augment the decision making process in 3 major ways.

1. Asking recruiters to weed through resumes is not the best way to bring the human touch into the hiring equation. Especially in larger organizations with lots of seats to fill, involving humans in deciding who meets minimum quals and who does not is not a very constructive use of your resources. I think that the level of human intervention needed early in the hiring process varies directly with the complexity of the job and with the number of seats to be filled. So I would agree that in some situations with fewer, higher level jobs it becomes more appropriate to seek human decision making in the earlier stages of the process but for cattle calls automation just makes more sense.

2. It is also important to understand that accurate prediction requires the use of tools. The validity of this has been demonstrated thousands of times over the past 50 years. These tools do not make decisions for people, rather they provide information that humans can then use to factor into their decision making process. Even in the dark days before the Internet, the quality of predictions made when hiring employees was greatly improved by the use of such predictive tools. In some sense all the Internet has done is allow us to automate these tools. So in the case of more in-depth scientific screening, I still feel that humans should be involved in the process, but providing them a set of tools helps provide the intelligence needed to help humans to make higher quality decisions.

3. From a legal standpoint, one of the most important things that must be addressed in selection systems is that all candidates are evaluated using the exact same criteria and that these are evaluated using a standardized decision making process. One of the most dangerous things about an entirely human powered decision making process is that it is difficult to control where and how subjectivity enters into the process. Automation provides a way to ensure that all candidates are evaluated based on the same exact pieces of information and that the algorythems used in the decision making process provide some standardization to the process. This does not mean that humans do not have a role in the process, in fact all decision making processes come down choices made by humans. All automation does is bring human decision making into the picture at the appropriate time and in a way the reduces the opportunity for unconstructive subjectivity.

So I DO NOT advocate removing the human touch from the selection process. Rather, I feel that online screening provides persons involved in the hiring process with a set of tools that can actually help them to make more informed decisions. I view the relationship between humans and automated systems as a kind of symbiosis.

Regards,
Charles Handler

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ETS
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