Federal officials caution employers on using AI in hiring; FCW, May 12, 2022

 Natalie Alms, FCW; Federal officials caution employers on using AI in hiring

"The growing use of artificial intelligence and other software tools for hiring, performance monitoring and pay determination in the workplace is compounding discriminiation against people with disabilities, federal civil rights officials say.

Artificial intelligence can be deployed to target job ads to certain potential applicants, hold online job interviews, assess the skills of job applicants and even decide if an applicant meets job requirements. But the technology can discriminate against applicants and employees with disabilities.

On Thursday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Justice put employers on alert that they're responsible for not using AI tools in ways that discriminate and inform employees of their rights, agency officials told reporters."

Don’t Let the Pandemic Sink Your Company Culture; Harvard Business Review (HBR), August 17, 2020

Jenny Chatman

 and 

Francesca Gino

,  Harvard Business Review (HBR); Don’t Let the Pandemic Sink Your Company Culture

"3. Model transcendent values. When the pandemic started, leaders of &pizza, a Washington, D.C.-based pizza chain that serves creative, oblong pies, decided this would be the perfect moment to leverage their culture. As they told one of us (Francesca), their founding philosophy was “doing good while being good” — to both serve and reflect the communities where their shops are located.

The leaders of &pizza created an initiative in March 2020 to provide free pies to health workers in hospitals dealing with Covid-19 patients. And recognizing how the pandemic might strain their own “tribe” (i.e., its employees), they raised workers’ hourly pay and increased their benefits — for instance, they offered free access to Netflix and paid for their travel to work. The company also gave employees who wanted to join protests after the killing of George Floyd paid time off. The company has retained 90% of its employees, and the 10% who left are mainly people who asking to be let go because of personal reasons. (Before the pandemic, its normal turnover rate was 10%.)

It is very likely that your organization has already adapted more quickly and effectively during the pandemic than you ever thought possible. Build on that progress by communicating that accomplishment to your employees and instituting the practices we’ve described. Doing so will almost certainly strengthen your culture — one that will help your organization better contend with whatever lies ahead."

The Backlash to Larry Fink’s Letter Shows How Far Business Has to Go on Social Responsibility; Harvard Business Review (HBR), January 31, 2019

Mark R. Kramer, Harvard Business Review; The Backlash to Larry Fink’s Letter Shows How Far Business Has to Go on Social Responsibility

"Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor with $6 trillion under management, evoked heated controversy with his remarks last week that his company would change its hiring and potentially its compensation structure to advance diversity and ensure that five years from now the company is not just “a bunch of white men.” This follows on the heels of his annual letter to CEOs asserting that companies need to embrace a purpose beyond just profit maximization.

Critics, according to Fox Business, were swift to accuse Fink’s commitment to diversity as a form of “corporate socialism,” complaining about “the propriety of a public company executive using business resources and his perch as CEO to advance a personal agenda.” The Fox article went on to quote Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware, saying: “This is fundamentally not the role of a public company, and it’s unfair to investors who may not agree with his politics. A CEO shouldn’t use house money to further a goal that may not create economic returns.”

I couldn’t disagree more. Business leaders must finally, once and for all, let go of the outdated and erroneous notion that social factors — and not just diversity — are irrelevant to the economic success of our companies."

Interview with Jeff Fluhr, chief executive of Spreecast; New York Times, 10/10/13

Adam Bryant, Corner Office, New York Times; Interview with Jeff Fluhr, chief executive of Spreecast, a social video platform: Finding Employees Who Fit: "Q. Tell me about your approach to hiring at your current company. A. I’ve found that the softer characteristics of a person — the cultural fit, the chemistry fit, their personality traits, their level of optimism — are far more important than somebody’s experience. What I was often doing at StubHub as the company grew was to say, “O.K., we need a V.P. of marketing and we want somebody who’s been a V.P. marketing at another consumer Internet company, and hopefully, they’ve done these certain things because that’s what we need.” But the reality is that if you get somebody who’s smart, hungry and has a can-do attitude, they can figure out how to do A, B and C, because there’s really no trick to most of these things... Q. What career advice would you give to a graduating class of college seniors? A. One of the things I tell people is that experience is overrated. I still sometimes find myself falling into the trap of thinking, when I’m trying to fill a role, “Has the person done the work that the role requires?” That’s the wrong question. It should be, “Let’s find a person who has the right chemistry, the right intellect, the right curiosity, the right creativity.” If we plug that person into any role, they’re going to be successful."