Select staff, team members, or performers
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 | 10 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 10 occupations that perform it.
- Nominate citizens to boards or commissions.
- Identify and recruit potential volunteer workers.
- Hire new faculty.
- Hire, train, and direct staff members who develop design concepts into art layouts or who prepare layouts for printing.
- Hire principal cast members and crew members, such as art directors, cinematographers, and costume designers.
- Perform personnel duties, such as hiring staff and evaluating work performance.
- Select performers for roles or submit lists of suitable performers to producers or directors for final selection.
- Plan strategies and choose team members for individual games or sports seasons.
- Audition and select performers for musical presentations.
- Interview and hire writers and reporters or negotiate contracts, royalties, and payments for authors or freelancers.
- Hire and supervise workers who help locate people with specified attributes and talents.
- Hire, supervise, and work with extended coaching staff.
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
10 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
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.