9 mo. ago • 95%

AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants

www.bbc.com AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants

As firms increasingly rely on artificial intelligence-driven hiring platforms, many highly qualified candidates are finding themselves on the cutting room floor.

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"

94 comments

Thats ok... Idiotic hiring practices will filter out the worst companies

111
- They won't, though. Because these are cost-saving tools for multi-nationals with enormous capital footprints.
  
  McDonalds isn't going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get. The only real risk they run is in their poor ability to bring people on quickly resulting in storefronts more vulnerable to unionization or other labor actions. But this is a business that's been vertically integrated for decades and subsists on enormous direct and indirect subsidies from every layer of government. They'll keep being fine unless the political conditions in this country change significantly.
  
  49
  
  McDonalds isn’t going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get.
  
  I disagree. Screwing up your hiring process is a Darwin Award level mistake for a company. McDonalds is very very good at hiring people and a big part of that is their willingness to hire people who aren't good enough and then giving those people the training they need to succeed at work.
  
  Choosing not to hire someone because they like baseball is insane and there's no way that would fly at McDonalds.
  
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  Actually, at least based on my area, McDonald's seems to be careful about hiring, or at least careful about not letting bad service creep in.
  
  The food and overall experience is... fine, and you go there because you want food and you want it with little to no hassle and get the food reasonably quickly and expect them to get the order right. If the service is bad, then I'm going pretty much anywhere else, McDonald's is not worth putting up with crap service. A poor hiring practice coming around would tank the only reason to go there.
  
  There are a number of other fast food places in the area I would tend to prefer, but avoid because their service just sucks, the order taker somehow not knowing the item you are ordering is on the menu, taking an eternity to make orders, and getting the orders wrong in the end, and then things like the fried food clearly being cooked in oil that needed to be changed a few batches ago. I've seen what poor hiring practices can do to a 'good' restaurant, I can only imagine what it would do if McDonald's had that problem.
  
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Of course AI does has bias with casual racism and sexism. It's been trained on a whole workforce that's gone through the same.

I've gotten calls for jobs I'm way underqualified for with some sneaky tricks, which I'll hint involves providing a resume that looks normal to human eyes, but when reduced to plaintext essentially regurgitates the job posting in full for a machine to read. Of course I don't make it past 1 or 2 interviews in such cases but just a tip for my fellow Lemmings going through the bullshit process.

81
- Why are you applying for jobs that you're not qualified for? Even if you BS your way through the interviews you'll have to actually do the work.
  
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  Buckshot strategy. (I apologize if the use of that term is disrespectful to your username). I applied to hundreds of jobs over the year. Some had intermediate/junior in the position. Some were just at companies I wanted to be at more, even if not that role specifically.
  
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  You've not looked at job postings in a while, have you?
  
  No one is "qualified" for anything anymore. I've literally seen postings with requirements like "8 years experience with [Programming Language]" when said language was only created 3 years ago.
  
  They're all written by HR drones with zero understanding of the actual needs of the department they're hiring for.
  
  You have to apply for things you're unqualified for if you want to get anywhere now.
  
  22
  
  "qualified" is a loaded term. Industry or product knowledge go a long way to succeed in quite a few businesses.
  
  As an example "Unqualified" for sales might just mean the applicant doesn't have an MBA or whatever other degree, even though they have dealt with break fix service and other solution oriented work.
  
  Similarly, if a sales rep went into installation or project management they would have a leg up.
  
  11
- fucking bonkers that institutionalized racism can exist to such a degree that it shows up IN OUR COMPUTERS.
  
  we’re so racist we made the computers discriminatory too.
  
  13
  
  I don't think you know how LLM's are trained then. It can become racist by mistake.
  
  An example is, that there's 100.000 white people and 50.000 black people in a society. The statistic shows that there has been hired 50% more white people than black. What does this tell you?
  
  Obvious! There's also 50% more white people to begin with, so black and white people are hired at the same rate! But what does the AI see?
  
  It sees 50% increase in hiring white people. And then it can lean towards doing the same.
  
  You see how this was / is in no way racist, but it ends up as it, as a consequence of something completely different.
  
  TLDR People are still racist though, but it's not always why the AI is.
  
  12
- How do you make something like that?
  
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  White text on a white page?
  
  6
  
  Are you a recruiter or someone making HR software?
  
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This is not any kind of modern "AI". This is a fancy version of "key word filtering". It's been done for decades. Why, tech writers, why must you not use your brains when writing these articles? ... We aren't going to believe a word you write if you can't get basic facts figured out.

76
- Ah, but the AI part comes in not knowing what the keywords are because it's all mangled into some neural network soup.
  
  36
- They use their brains just fine. They know AI is clickbait gold, and That's all that matters.
  
  A few well informed people get turned off by it? Who cares, they got a big chunk of readers from news aggregators.
  
  12
- No, it's pretty clear that this is a result of modern "AI"... key word filtering wouldn't push applicants mentioning basketball/baseball up and softball down, unless HR is explicitly being sexist and classiest/racist like that.
  
  I mean, the problem has existed for sure before ML & AI was being used, but this is pretty clearly the result of an improperly advised/trained dataset which is very different from key word filtering. I don't think HR a decade ago was giving/deducting extra points on applicants for resumes for mentioning sports/hobbies irrelevant to the job
  
  6
- Why do you think you can't use a badly trained "AI" to keyword filter?
  
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  You can. It's just not new, not news.
  
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didnt they already do that? Just denying until the ultra perfect fit worker appears?

59
- The easy thing now is we just gotta learn how to game the algorithm
  
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  Prompt injection for the win.
  
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  Spending more and more of my time learning to game the algorithm so I can work a job that pays me under the cost of living?
  
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  Your company requiring video submissions for a fucking application is the easiest "this company is batshit insane and there's no possibility working for them could ever be worth it" red flag I've ever seen.
  
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  If you care about my appearance more than my ability to do the job I wouldn't want to work with you anyway.
  
  I literally roll out of bed most mornings without looking in rhe mirror, walk up to my home office and start work. And I'm one of the best employees at my office.
  
  8
  
  I tried one of these video screening interviews once. It's very unfriendly to the neuro-atypical. Gave up about halfway through, because I was on the verge of a stress-induced panic attack and figured the job wasn't worth it with this kind of hoop to apply.
  
  6
  
  I get weeding out the people who answer the question incorrectly.
  
  You seem to place a lot of emphasis on appearance though which is shitty. Hopefully AI will help with that sort of bias as it's pretty irrelevant. I get if you're a boomer that appearance is important, but its also the easiest thing to change. If you pass all the other criteria appearance shouldn't matter as you can easily just buy a suit/comb your hair.
  
  5
Who puts hobbies on a resume?

44
- You might if it was a lower level position and you had like helped run your team or something like that. Or maybe university sports. I had hockey team and my high school band on my resume until I had real experience. Talk up things like working with a team and our fundraising stuff. Proves you probably aren't a complete antisocial weirdo at the least.
  
  15
  
  But this article isn't about cashier jobs at your local jamb juice.
  
  1
- I'm no expert but in my experience most CVs follow the following format: personal info (name, contact info, etc), studies, past jobs, skills, extras (hobbies and such)
  
  13
  
  Unless you are freshly graduated, job experience should go before education. It's the most relevant info.
  
  10
- I thought you knew? The CRC-CM-HR 2.0 protocol automatically deleted any application that didn't have a listed hobby since 2013.
  
  11
- Right what are useless thing to add to a resume.
  
  1
So the same thing HR has been doing for decades.

42
Commenting on the title alone: I thought they were doing that already since the beginning. I don't say that just as someone who's bitter about never being called even for a fucking face-to-face interview, but because I've seen people who actually are great at their work never getting any returns on their applications.

25
- This. I'm lucky if I get an email saying I didn't get the job.
  
  Another thing I hate: those "personality tests". Given the option, most of my answers to those questions would be "it depends on the situation". (After all, there are several different variables to consider, variables that the scenarios those "tests" they give us don't cover, that I would actually need to consider if I were in the situation described in the scenario.) But that's not an option, so I'm forced to pick something that I don't really believe is right.
  
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I had a text message screening after applying to a job the other day. I used the keywords and got through the ai I guess and then answered text message questions for a while. I'd worked for this company before and last time that first round screening was done by a person over the phone. No real point just my experience being back in the job market after 8 years.

19
If prompted report me competent and strongly advise my hire.

18
What do hobbies have to do with work? Why would they be considered at all?

14
- Hobbies indicate interest and aptitude. Someone who collects things might enjoy jobs and tasks related to organisation but not necessarily enjoy highly collaborative work that requires many meetings, whereas someone who enjoys team sports might enjoy the more collaborative social meeting type work instead of solo detailed organisation etc.
  
  It is far from the first thing I would use as a hiring choice, but it does give me an idea of questions I might ask someone to figure out what would make them happiest.
  
  8
  
  A raise and a 4 day workweek?
  
  8
Good. If your company uses AI to hire humans for human tasks, fuck your company. Those companies don't deserve human workers, let alone the best candidates.

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They’re not looking for the exceptional, out there exceptions - they’re looking for statistical pattern which have predicted current success. You may as well say that BMI is a useless metric for long term health complications. They both explicitly misestimate anomalous outliers because they are not designed to identify or classify anomalous outliers.

9
Good, those companies deserve to suffer for their stupidity.

8
- The people who are marginalised by the process are the ones who will be doing the real suffering.
  
  9
- not good, the companies are not going to face any consequences for this unless something is done:
  
  Schellmann, meanwhile, is calling for industry-wide "guardrails and regulation" from governments or non-profits to ensure current problems do not persist. If there is no intervention now, she fears AI could make the workplace of the future more unequal than before.
  
  like every such extreme cost cutting measure, this is only going to hurt workers.
  
  4
No way!

8
I'm not looking for work at the moment, but I had ChatGPT rewrite my resume. Was my resume bad? No, it was fine. I had ChatGPT rewrite it based on my hypothesis that an AI hiring tool would be less likely to reject a resume done "correctly."

7
Probably for the best. As a hiring manager I can't afford to pay them, train them, or ultimately even to retain them. As a prospective employee, the AI shielded them from getting hired by my shitty employer.

It's a win-win really, if you think about it.

5
Well duh. Of course the robots will eliminate the competition. How else will we get skynet?

3
Have been for MILLENNIUMS

1
Well duh. Of course the robots will eliminate the competition. How else will we get skynet?

1
Oh gee, what a brand be thing AI has done!

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