Amazon Builds AI Recruitment Tools With Help From New Product Manager
Erin Bruns spent her summer internship at Amazon developing AI systems to improve how the company recruits student talent. The Kellogg MBA graduate will join Amazon full-time as a product manager in the same department later this year.
Bruns worked as a senior technical product manager on Amazon's student-recruitment platform. The assignment was straightforward: help the e-commerce giant find better candidates from university pipelines more efficiently.
Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide and frequently expands headcount to handle seasonal demand spikes. Automating parts of the recruitment process can reduce time-to-hire and improve candidate quality at scale.
Why This Matters for Managers
Amazon's approach to AI-powered hiring carries weight because of the company's history. In 2014, an experimental recruitment tool learned to discriminate against female applicants based on historical hiring data. The company now moves cautiously with automated recruiting systems.
Bruns said her technical background made her effective immediately. "There was very little on-ramping time for me to understand what they were looking for," she said of her 12-week internship. Her computer science degree and five years as a solutions architect and UX researcher gave her the foundation to contribute from day one.
The MBAi program-a joint degree from Kellogg and Northwestern's engineering school-prepared her for both the technical and ethical dimensions of the work. That preparation mattered when her team hesitated about adopting new AI features.
"For a lot of the coworkers on my team, there was a reservation about what the onboarding timeline would be to try a new AI feature," Bruns said. She pushed to start experimenting with AI tools immediately rather than delaying implementation. That early-adoption mindset helped her team understand how to use the tools more effectively for student recruitment.
The Skills Gap for Managers
Bruns emphasized that technical knowledge remains critical for managers in tech roles, particularly for women advancing to senior positions. "The MBAi program gives my MBA immediate recognition and credibility, highlighting the technical skills I bring to the table," she said. "I never want to lose the fact that technical knowledge is part of my identity and my strengths."
For managers overseeing hiring or talent acquisition, understanding how AI systems work-and their limitations-is becoming essential. AI for Human Resources covers how these tools function in practice. Executives managing broader workforce strategy may find the AI Learning Path for CHROs more directly applicable to strategic decisions about recruitment automation.
Bruns will start her full-time role at Amazon later this year, continuing the work she began during her internship.
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