If there’s one thing just about everyone in the 21st-century business world agrees on it, it’s that innovation leads to efficiency, and efficiency is good. But is it possible that new technologies that are supposed to make HR easier are actually doing more harm than good?

As Danielle Weinblatt wrote this week in a column for the Huffington Post, it’s possible to take the automation of human-resources procedures too far.

There are three technologies that Weinblatt cautions can cause problems.

1. Online resume submission: “Applicant tracking systems” allow job applicants to enter their resume information online, to help recruiters sift through large amounts of data to come up with matches. But as Weinblatt points out, this often disadvantages applicants who are seeking to break into new fields, because their resumes may not match keyword searches. They almost guarantee a cookie-cutter hire.

2. Social network graders: There are a growing number of tools used to measure an individual’s activities and influence on social media. Increasingly, HR departments are including those scores in sizing up a job applicant. But as Weinblatt puts it, “Does this mean that if you spend more time at work actually doing your job and less time on Twitter and Facebook that you are actually worse off than your peers?” (I wrote about the problem with using Klout scores in hiring decisions back in August.)