Administer personnel recruitment or hiring activities
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The reporting and paperwork around management automate well. Directing, developing and evaluating people does not, and people do not accept it when it is attempted on them.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Managing, training and developing people |
| Jobs that do it | 7 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Enterprise platforms |
| O*NET activity | Staffing Organizational Units (4.A.4.c.2) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 7 occupations that perform it.
- Hire trainers or coaches to advise clients on performance matters, such as training techniques or performance presentations.
- Administer oral, written, road, or flight tests to license applicants.
- Hire employees and process hiring-related paperwork.
- Recruit and hire agricultural workers.
- Recruit, interview, and select employees.
- Refer applicants to job openings or to interviews with other staff, in accordance with administrative guidelines or office procedures.
- Process and review employment applications to evaluate qualifications or eligibility of applicants.
- Score tests and observe equipment operation and control to rate ability of applicants.
- Review employment applications and job orders to match applicants with job requirements.
- Inform job applicants of their acceptance or rejection of employment.
- Select qualified job applicants or refer them to managers, making hiring recommendations when appropriate.
- Select applicants meeting specified job requirements and refer them to hiring personnel.
- Schedule or administer skill, intelligence, psychological, or drug tests for current or prospective employees.
- Arrange for advertising or posting of job vacancies and notify eligible workers of position availability.
- Administer and score applicant and employee aptitude, personality, and interest assessment instruments.
What we would actually use
Nothing in our landscape addresses this work. That is the honest answer rather than a padded list: this activity needs a person present, or a machine rather than a software agent.
Buy nothing. The reporting and paperwork around management run on whatever you already use for documents, and the part that is actually managing people does not automate at any price.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Enterprise platforms
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
7 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Agents and Business Managers of Artists, Performers, and Athletes
- Compliance Officers
- Eligibility Interviewers, Government Programs
- Farm Labor Contractors
- First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers
- Human Resources Assistants, Except Payroll and Timekeeping
- Human Resources Specialists
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Perform recruiting or hiring activities”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.