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The computers rejecting job applications

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#81

Post by whimsicalism »

sgerenser wrote: post #33
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, the logistics of hiring make this a reality. I remember helping my boss hire interns, and picked a few out. Later on, they found out that they weren’t able to go to all of the schools that they wanted, they could only choose 2. Where did all the people from other schools go? Straight in the trash. Same deal with hiring full-time employees in my experience. Random, usually understandable circumstances preclud…

The current large tech company I work for had a recruiter posting messages on LinkedIn like “we’re hiring like crazy in for people with !” I had already applied on their careers site and got no response. Messaged this recruiter and got no response. Applied again to a similar position maybe 2 months later, got a response, got an interview, and now I’m working there. Guess my point is there’s clearly a lot of randomnes…

Any application process is mostly luck after you meet a certain threshold IMO.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#82

Post by moritonal »

JackFr wrote: post #10

This 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."

This always annoyed me, because it's almost certain those candidates were in some kind of order.

It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order.

So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#83

Post by NotPavlovsDog »

OliverGilan wrote: post #56
bogwog wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like it could be discriminatory against people with certain disabilities. Besides the fact that it's stupid and somewhat embarassing.

I literally was embarrassed. I didn't want to work for a company that selected talent like that.

Perhaps you aspired to find a job that rewarded on merit. They perhaps aimed to form an orderly line of obedient sycophants. The test worked, to the benefit of both parties.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#84

Post by KineticLensman »

JackFr wrote: post #10

This 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."

See 'the secretary problem' [0], which is a more sophisticated version of the above. It's a process that can be summarised roughly as follows.

Given a pile of CVs

Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368)

Dump that 40%

Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you have just dumped

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#85

Post by aspaceman »

curiousllama wrote: post #40

I was part of a very in-depth evaluations of both Pymetrics & HireVue for a large company recently (2 different evals, among others). Some interesting things we observed: (1) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether either tool did anything more useful than filter out people who don't want to take the test / don't trust "AI". (2) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether (1) was…

How do you find good psych people? Showing my bias but it’s a genuine question. I remember in school all the psych and social psych folks being total jackoffs in blowoff classes.

How do you find people you can take seriously? Who don’t just quote psychology today and act like it’s insight? Like I know the field is professional and has skilled professionals - but how do you find them?

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#86

Post by swalsh »

10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations, already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to treating people as "resources", completely dropping the word "human".

We all need to think about the future we're building here.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#87

Post by andrewem »

OliverGilan wrote: post #38

About a year and half ago I was applying for a software engineering internship at Goldman Sachs and they made me take a Pymetrics test. One of the tasks was to press the spacebar as many times as possible in 30 seconds. I didn't do the task and withdrew my application.

There was an arcade game many years ago where that was part of the game play, and this “test” could probably be manipulated in the same way: “ Because the game responded to repeatedly pressing the "run" buttons at high frequency, players of the arcade version resorted to various tricks such as rapidly swiping a coin or ping-pong ball over the buttons, or using a metal ruler which was repeated struck such that it would vibrate and press the buttons.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_&_Field_(video_game)

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#88

Post by ghaff »

crispyambulance wrote: post #57

Doing an online application to initiate contact with a potential employer is already a strike against the applicant. The whole point of these systems is to whittle down the pool of candidates down to single digits. Of course each candidate is going to "perfectly match" the stated faux-objective criteria because that's what the users of these systems think they want. Whether or not that's what they need is another que…

That's been my experience but it probably does legitimately depend. I think there are some people whose skills match sought after keywords and they're fine with those positions. If you've got a more eclectic (and often more senior with varied types of experience), keywords probably don't help much at all.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#89

Post by patrickthebold »

dcolkitt wrote: post #36

The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against the hiring AI. You'd have the system generate your resume and application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on. In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly explain why their resume is a recipe for carne a…

I have a section on my resume called:

'Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With'

Underneath is a Laundry list of today's sexiest technologies.

It's not quite as advanced as your suggestion, but it's pretty effective. It's also a good icebreaker when you have the in person interview.

Re: The computers rejecting job applications

#90

Post by JustARandomGuy »

Related story: I applied for a position with United Airlines a few months ago. I started the job application, then stopped in the middle for whatever reason. United’s job system emailed me at 9 PM a reminder to continue my application, and I completed it less than a half hour later. A half hour after that (just after 10 PM) United emailed me a rejection notice. So either some United recruiter was working late (I’m in the same time zone as United’s HQ) or my resume was completely rejected by a bot.

It’s pretty annoying to put in all that work and get a rejection so quickly.

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