Stanford professor: Don't let artificial intelligence pick your employees

Implicit in his comment is the notion that, someday, these systems will be ready. But work by Adina Sterling, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, questions this optimism, linking it to a deep–and deeply problematic–misconception of hiring's strategic role. In a new paper coauthored with Daniel W. Elfenbein of Washington University in St. Louis and published in Strategy Science, Sterling articulates how smart hiring is inextricable from long-term corporate strategy; she also explains why delegating the responsibility of hiring to machines, at least in the near future, is likely to undermine its strategic potential. "With technology increasingly stepping into this role, we're at a moment in which these questions of higher-level strategy ought to be of great importance," she says. The use of machines in hiring became widespread roughly a quarter-century back, when career platforms like Monster.com emerged on the web.