A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI • Hacker News Board

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#21

Post by chrisseaton » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

pja wrote: post #15

chrisseaton wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why ultra-elite companies like Google don't swap to a model where they reach out to people they want to hire, rather than accepting random applications?

Google employees a team of recruiters to do exactly this.

I know - I meant why do they also have an open mailbox for millions of people not remotely qualified (I presume) to spam into, creating this problem for themselves.

If you’re at the level of working for Google you’re presumably already at the absolute top of your field internationally and will know people at Google you can reach out to personally.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#22

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

I think job applicants should have to compete with eachother in a craps tournament. Losers are knocked out of the pool until the number of applicants matches the number of open positions. I also think this is how we should choose the president.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#23

Post by drongoking » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

Whenever I see AI used for something like this, right after thinking "our dystopia is here," I wonder how it could be gamed. An experienced interviewer can tell when they're being told what they want to hear; I suspect an AI could not. The AI ends up rewarding preparation and acting skills. And when you make too many hoops for people to jump through, eventually you find you're just selecting for those who are good at hoop-jumping.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#24

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

I consult. When its remote, I sometimes recommend we have a person on the ground (at the customer plant) to coordinate and manage data. If they don't agree, I hire a graduate anyway and ask that a place be made in their office for them. Ultimately the client find them useful and they get hired on, because the client actually did need somebody to be expert in the new software.

It's a responsibility to help young graduates find an entry to a company. All it takes is that first entry.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#25

Post by masterjefferson » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #24

I consult. When its remote, I sometimes recommend we have a person on the ground (at the customer plant) to coordinate and manage data. If they don't agree, I hire a graduate anyway and ask that a place be made in their office for them. Ultimately the client find them useful and they get hired on, because the client actually did need somebody to be expert in the new software. It's a responsibility to help young gradu…

We need more folks like you.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#26

Post by LeftHandPath » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #4

This has got to be a fake. The only way AI would be able to make any sort of correct judgment about someone's probable future performance is if it had some training set of data of employees who had their interviews recorded and who were known to be bad in some way. However, it's still a massive leap in logic to be able to correlate anything an AI could observe to some tangibly bad behavior later on. I'm thinking the…

I am not sure where I heard it, but I keep coming back to the quote "There is no algorithm for absolute truth". People who aren't in-the-know about AI tend to lend it much more credit, when it comes to its ability to accurately measure something, than is due.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#27

Post by modzu » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

the fear mongering in here is interesting. "secret, unproven" algorithms (much less intelligent than anything developed with machine learning) already control an individuals access to all sorts of things, like college, credit, insurance, etc. there is a positive side to approaching this problem and more humans is never going to be it.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#28

Post by mistrial9 » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

stopads wrote: post #5

jimbob45 wrote: post #4

This has got to be a fake. The only way AI would be able to make any sort of correct judgment about someone's probable future performance is if it had some training set of data of employees who had their interviews recorded and who were known to be bad in some way. However, it's still a massive leap in logic to be able to correlate anything an AI could observe to some tangibly bad behavior later on. I'm thinking the…

Google and other large tech giants have been working on precisely that sort of AI with those types of data for at least 10 years now. They are famous for tinkering with their hiring process based on mountains of data, with mostly bad results. Which aspect do you find farfetched?

confirm that at least one UC Berkeley affiliated PR was paid quite a lot of money to do exactly this kind of work for several years, that was five years ago at least.. they did not use bombastic terms to describe the project, evoking the authority aspect, instead they used language that signaled "finding hidden talent"

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#29

Post by HarryHirsch » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #22

I think job applicants should have to compete with eachother in a craps tournament. Losers are knocked out of the pool until the number of applicants matches the number of open positions. I also think this is how we should choose the president.

Wikipedia has an article on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

tl;dr: the method works.

Re: A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

#30

Post by danpalmer » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

My brother has just finished a masters programme and is starting to apply for jobs, he's coming up against a lot of these.

He's smart, motivated, very hard working, and has the necessary credentials on his CV, but when talking to him he's quite monotone and low energy. Because of this, he's failing these automated video interviews as he looks like he's not a "team player" or "personable".

While interviewing practice is becoming more aware of bias against things like this, the training data for these "AI" systems are going to be based on those interviews conducted in the past, often with questionable outcomes. The software is sold as helping "remove bias", but it instead pulls interview bias forwards in more extreme ways to the CV-review stage, preventing candidates from ever getting in front of a human.

While multiple humans on a hiring team may overcome some of their biases working together, a single piece of software trained to look for stereotypes will exacerbate those biases.