Dive Brief:

• Employers are looking to determine if technology is better at deciding who's coming, who's going and who has leadership potential, according to Fortune.
• To do that, they are enlisting data scientists and using software applications that can predict those outcomes better than human beings, the theory goes.
• For example, Fortune cites eBay, which created algorithms to figure out who is the most likely to leave the company, while IBM has been using its vaunted Watson technology to build better internal hiring by matching workers with job opportunities.

Dive Insight:

Fortune talked to experts who say that while this trend has some clear upsides, using this tech-based approach can have pitfalls. For one thing, according to one expert, using past hiring data to build predictive algorithms could create undetected problems. A negative, such as hiring discrimination, could wind up inside an algorithm. And things like a family illness could show up as a performance negative, which is not the case at all.

Then there is the issue of employee privacy. Corey Ciocchetti, a law and ethics professor at the University of Denver, told Fortune that some software can capture keystrokes and email activity. And while legally employers are allowed to grab that data, the hope is transparency will keep employers from breaking that trust. Otherwise, it could "backfire."

Even so, there is optimism. “It’s going to dramatically change the way we work,” Ryan Hammond, head of people analytics at HiQ Labs, which uses external data from multiple sources to predict which employees are most likely to be poached, told Fortune.