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BUSINESS ANALYTICS SOCIAL IMPACT OF MANAGEMENT BUSINESS OF CLIMATE CHANGE INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND LEADERSHIP
IN YOUR WORKPLACE
T
hroughout his career, retired human resources
executive Bernard Brothman, BS/MBA '80,
witnessed the evolution of artificial intelligence.
His work in HR began in 1980, a pre-com-
puter era, when it was common practice to sort résumés by
hand: receiving them by mail, reading them all and manu-
ally sorting candidates into stacks of yes, maybe and no.
Three jobs and three companies later, he worked
at M&M Mars, a world-leading snack food manufac-
turer, where he helped set up a recruitment portal on the
mars.com website.
He selected the RecruitMax soware, which was
cutting-edge at the time. RecruitMax would search
résumés for keywords from job descriptions to find poten-
tial candidates more effectively.
"The technology advanced throughout the 2000s and
I was seeing artificial intelligence starting to do a lot of
the work that we normally did ourselves," says Brothman.
"But candidates quickly caught on and they would import
text verbatim from job postings into their résumés even
if they weren't necessarily qualified, so the AI would flag
it as a match. They'd even put keywords in and change the
font color to white so a person wouldn't see them, but the
machine would."
Brothman says that's just one example of why
it's important to have human oversight in AI-assisted
processes to ensure fairness and prevent bias.
"You've got to do an audit to see what's happening,
because AI isn't perfect," he says. "We need to stop and
look at what the AI is giving us and how the machine
BY K E V I N M A N N E
