Personnel Matters

Experts disagree on whether computers could be trusted to select job candidates. "I think you'd be nuts to have hiring done totally automatically," says Tom Davenport, a professor at Babson College who often writes about decision automation. "There are a lot of things about people that you can't assess with automated tools."

But Raja Parasuraman, a professor at George Mason University and an expert on decision automation, says computers might make more accurate personnel decisions than people because computers can better zero in on factors that correlate to success. He uses the example of college admissions: "Suppose there are 10 areas that are relative to whether a high school student will graduate from college and do well," he says. "You can come up with a predictor. You can put that into a computer."

"People will say, 'Yeah, I look at [test scores], but I also want to do an interview.' Their decisions are not any better than if you simply follow these statistical methods," Parasuraman says. "If you put the statistical equation into a computer, that computer has years of objective data." There may be exceptions, but on average the formula will be better.

Some federal agencies have automated the initial screening of job applicants using Web-based systems such as QuickHire, a software program from Monster Government Solutions, a division of New York City-based Monster Worldwide. QuickHire streamlines human resources operations by determining whether candidates meet basic requirements before sending their applications to the HR department.

But the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services departments experienced firsthand one of the downsides of automation when QuickHire was overwhelmed by applicants and both departments had to shut down their hiring sites in March. Thousands of applications were lost, and the departments had to find expensive alternatives. Homeland Security terminated its contract with QuickHire. Health and Human Services stuck with it, and the system became fully operational again at the beginning of August.