The computers rejecting job applications
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Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#2If computers can reject your job application, your value in the market probably is not worth much. I would work on that.
I am not worried about computers blocking me. Google and Facebook do try to censor my comments with their algorithms. They're pretty easy to get around. I'm more concerned by individuals with political agenda (like for example, here, where I have been shadow-banned by being targeted manually for engaging in "wrongthink": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624084).
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#3I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the personality tests for them, but with video it’s gotten harder. It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There doesn’t seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn’t do it, the software did it.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#4I assume that not all roles go through this process. If you are hiring for a sensitive position (CEO, other C-suite, any type of Compliance and Internal Audit), the process is different.
I will also assume that the "AI" does only the first clean-up. Basically moving them from the 'pile on the floor' to the 'table', pick the 'top 100' for a role.
Fun story: When working for a US tech company some years back, we were looking for IT Auditors. Someone saw the word "audit" on an ad and applied. The guy was a "night auditor" (hotels). He didn't bother reading the ad, he just applied. HR didn't review his CV at all, they set up the meeting. We laughed, apologized, got him a coffee, we exchnaged funny/horror stories, and he went his merry way.
An AI system would have picked that up in 1ms. A lazy/overwhelmed HR employee did not.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#5While there is a natural "that's not fair!" reaction to this, and also I think that a lot of these companies are selling snake oil, I also have to wonder if it can be much worse than the human screening most applicants go through for these kinds of jobs.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#6I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the personality tests for them, but with video it’s gotten harder. It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There doesn’t seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn’t do it, the software did it.
>It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors
In some European countries like Germany, Spain and Austria it's not even tacit as it's tradition to have your photo and birthday in your resume, especially for more traditional companies, to the point where it generated some scandals in Austria and Germany since in some companies, being black or having Slavic/Turkish/Arabic names got your CV rejected by default even though the CVs would fit the requirements.
But it's ok, since they write in the footer of their career page that they don't discriminate on such things. /s
Edit: There's even some German satire about the racism job applicants face over having photos in resumes:
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#7I don't think this is bad at all. If there are so many job application that human can't scale enough to process all of them, it should be a big firm with reputation and those companies are spammed by job application from all ranges of candidates. It is just a spam mail detector with job application flavor.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#8I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the personality tests for them, but with video it’s gotten harder. It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There doesn’t seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn’t do it, the software did it.
>It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors In some European countries like Germany, Spain and Austria it's not even tacit as it's tradition to have your photo and birthday in your resume, especially for more traditional companies, to the point where it generated some scandals in Austria and Germany since in some companies, being black or havin…
> they don't discriminate on these things.
In the U.S. they explicitly do discriminate on these things (and are often required to do so by law), but only in one direction.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#9I used to work as a programmer in this field. I'm torn, on one side the "science" behind it is based on statistics and is supposed to be validated. Your view depends largely on whether you trust the validity of psychometrics. On the other side, someone makes a test wraps some statistics around it and says it's valid and measures what it's supposed can seem a little far fetched.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#10This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes.
He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."