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.

In 2014, Amazon launched a new recruitment algorithm to help it find the best job candidates. A year into the experiment, the company saw that the tool was biased against women and quietly shut the program down. When Reuters broke the story last October, John Jersin, the product leader for LinkedIn Talent Solutions, offered his thoughts on the general landscape of algorithmic hiring: "I certainly would not trust any AI system today to make a hiring decision on its own," he said. "The technology is just not ready yet." Implicit in his comment is the notion that, someday, these systems will be ready.