AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants

Rimu@piefed.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 339 points –
AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants
bbc.com

an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed "baseball" or "basketball" – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned "softball" – typically women – were downgraded.

Marginalised groups often "fall through the cracks, because they have different hobbies, they went to different schools"

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Yeah, I went through comments like this the last time I posted similar to reddit.

Like I said, I hate it from the candidate perspective. From the hiring manager perspective, I got over 200 resumes and that was after automated filtering and after a human HR person filtered them further. I am very open to your ideas for a more efficient way to filter through 200 perfectly acceptable resumes without conducting 2 months of back-to-back interviews. Automated application tools allow for a person to apply to 100 jobs quickly; hiring managers have to get comparable tools to deal with the volume, and this video filtering is at least one option in the toolbox.

To the people who are commenting it's ripe for sexism/racism/ other isms. Yes, just like in-person or via videoconferencing interviews are opportunities for bias. At some point, one does have to interact with the candidate and their gender, race, etc will be apparent. One could argue for double blind "auditions" like major symphony orchestras are doing but the argument now goes way beyond just video submissions and to general interviewing practices.

To the people who say, "I would never do a prerecorded video session". Fine. And as a hiring manager, I understand the potential of losing out on a fewqualified candidates. Again, this is a tool to further filter 200+ candidates so some candidates opting out is not the end of the world to me.

You should hate it as a manager. You're filtering out every single quality candidate because only a deranged nut job would even consider such an unhinged request. Submitting a video, in and of itself, proves they are not worth hiring.

You don't need to process every candidate. Just randomly take 5%, or 1%, or .001%, and do a real hiring process. Anything at all is better than requiring a video application.

It's been working for me pretty well.

I certainly wouldn't select this tool for hiring for all jobs, it does filter on some skills that are directly related to the job I hire for. Customer facing. High levels of comfort with office software and videoconferencing. Showing some degree of preparation when giving the question or request in advance. Being able to put someone in front of a customer or government official and trust that they hold it together is important.

I don't see value in it for a role that doesn't require those sorts of communication skills. Some analyst or programmer who mostly works on their own projects and only interacts with their internal team? This isn't the tool to use in hiring.

I don't really get why people are up in arms at this stuff. I hate the idea of doing these type of interviews, sure. But my grad program had 3k applications, 1k video interviews, 300 in person interviews, and only 100 actual roles. How the fuck else do they expect people to handle the sheer size of applications in management/HR roles?

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You are selecting for the people privileged enough to know how or spend the time figuring out how to record and send video. Even if someone has used teams every day for presentations, it's easy to avoid using recording features when videoconferencing is all live.

If your workplace creates pre-recorded videos for office use, then sure I guess it's a skill you can select for.

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