By Kevin Flemming, CSP Kevin Flemming is president of Integrity Personnel, Inc., a Lehigh Valley-based staffing and recruiting firm. He writes about staffing issues for small and medium-sized employers. His column, "Talent Search," appears in the Eastern Pennsylvania Business Journal every third week of the month.

Business owners and executives beware! The infamous Internet Revolution of the 1990s is still alive, despite being characterized as irrational by so many business gurus in the past three years. To put it another way, the mindset that caused the bubble still exists in today’s entrepreneurial culture (albeit under the radar of the national press).

I recently witnessed this at an event highlighting a handful of new companies in search of venture capital. Although the environment and overall mood of the program was in stark contrast to the rock and roll hype of similar events in the late 90s, the business cases presented by some of the participants were disturbingly familiar.

The companies’ founders were dressed in suits and possessed weightier resumes than their twenty-something counterparts from the previous decade. But the ideas touted in their marketing material carried the same old theme: project huge revenues and unlimited profits by using the Internet to perform tasks that are now done by people.

Like all technological advances, the Internet has indeed improved business. Internet applications help us to perform certain tasks faster, at reduced costs and usually with better results. However, the key to those benefits is not that technology replaces work—it merely enables us to work better. This is the center of my argument with some of the ideas proposed by the entrepreneurs who participated in this event. One company in particular has designed a product to replace a very critical step in an employer’s hiring process.

Personal involvement needed to get the right information
A job candidate’s work experience is the most important measure of their ability to perform in their next position, and verifying a person’s previous employment requires time and diligence on the part of the interviewer. Due to the personal effort required, many hiring managers tend to avoid this critical task when evaluating a potential employee. Most companies would not admit the oversight publicly, but I have observed first-hand that many employers never checked the background or work history of their current employees.

Perhaps because of this fact, the startup company that I encountered developed an Internet application to check a person’s references without any effort on the part of the interviewer. Their product requires a job candidate’s former employers to complete a lengthy online questionnaire that describes the candidate’s work ethic, skill set and personality. The hiring manager only needs to direct the candidate to a website where he must enter all of his old bosses’ contact information. From there, the application bombards those poor folks with automated e-mail requests until they respond.

The selling point behind this product seems to be that the hiring manager doesn’t need to be involved. The pressure to request and obtain all of the required information is placed on the job seekers and their former employers. I view this as problematic for a couple of reasons. First, a great number of companies resist providing any information about former employees. Fearing potential legal liability from releasing false or damaging information, most of these companies choose to block all information concerning their ex-workers. No amount of e-mails will compel a hapless supervisor to violate company policy.

Secondly, by ceding the responsibility of performing due diligence on a candidate’s background, the hiring manager creates an excuse for not doing her job. Instead of empowering that person to make a business decision, this product takes the burden of proof and the subsequent accountability for a poor hire off of the decision-maker. “I couldn’t get any information about the candidate before I offered him a job, so it’s not my fault that we didn’t know he was a kleptomaniac.”

Technology can improve recruiting…but doesn’t replace judgment

On balance, new technology has a very important place in workforce recruiting. At my firm, we work hard to incorporate the best technology solutions available in our staffing practice. For example, we use specialized testing software to measure a candidate’s skills. We leverage database software to categorize skills and experience so that we can quickly identify the people our clients need. And we take full advantage of Internet applications to feed our recruiting network and reach out to potential employees in the labor pool. This type of technology enables us to perform the tasks of recruiting faster.

But the computer does not replace the interviewer’s observation of a candidate’s behavior during a face-to-face meeting. It cannot replace the information gained through active questioning of a former supervisor. And it will never substitute the judgment of an experienced human resources professional. Certain tasks can only be accomplished through the disciplined and personal involvement of the decision-maker.

In the ongoing effort to create efficiency through the use of new technology—especially Internet-based tools—we can easily step outside of reality. Alan Greenspan will forever be famous for his “irrational exuberance” quote related to the last stock market bubble. It seems to this writer that not everyone has gotten this out of their system.