The Boston Red Sox may not want to check their Glassdoor rating for a bit.
In the aftermath of Boston's stunning trade of Rafael Devers to the San Francisco Giants, details have emerged about the dysfunction in Craig Breslow's front office -- particularly involving their reliance on AI and analytics.
Reporter Joon Lee provided an example of this dysfunction earlier this week, revealing on NBC Sports Boston's Arbella Early Edition that one candidate interviewing for a Red Sox baseball operations job went through five rounds of interviews without speaking to a human being.
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SIGN UP HERE "During this interview process, the entire interview was conducted with an AI bot, where you would record the answers to the questions and then the Red Sox would then evaluate them," Lee said.
"And this wasn't just one round. It wasn't just two rounds. It was five rounds of interviews where this person did not talk to another person in the Red Sox organization."
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The Red Sox called Lee's reporting "unsubstantiated" in a statement Wednesday and insisted they mostly used HireVue -- the AI and human resources management company that "conducted" those interviews -- to screen a vast number of applications early in the hiring process.
But there's more evidence that suggests Boston's HR operation isn't exactly five-star quality.
The Boston Globe's Alex Speier spoke to "multiple individuals" who described their interview process with the Red Sox as "discouragingly impersonal," with "infrequent human interaction relative to other teams." That impersonality manifested itself in the form of a brutal form letter received by several candidates who didn't make it to the final stages of interviews.
From Speier:
The sense of the team’s impersonal approach to hiring was amplified last year by the fact that multiple applicants, after completing the problem set and HireVue interview, received the same emailed form letter, with the same unfortunate top-level sentence:
“Thank you for your interest in working for the Boston Red Sox and applying for the {{insert job title}}.”
“I didn’t go further than that line. I kind of laughed and closed out the email,” said one applicant. “That was the part that upset me in the moment. I still look back and laugh on it.”
That's a tough look for a professional baseball team looking to attract the best front-office talent in the sport.
Speier added that some had better experiences with the Red Sox, with one candidate noting he received a follow-up call from a Boston staffer with feedback about his application. But another candidate described the whole process as "awkward and cold."
On its face, the Red Sox doing everything they can to leverage AI and analytics isn't a bad thing. But the reporting of the past week suggests Breslow and his front office have gone too far in embracing data while failing to connect with job candidates -- as well as their own staffers and players -- on a personal level.
And nothing drives that home like the dreaded form letter typo.