The computers rejecting job applications

How can you "validate" it? Are companies making all their staff take these tests and then measuring performance? But the people in your company isn't RCT. Are companies basing this on research that is done on random people? Okay, but skills required on most jobs aren't correlated to some "general" intelligence. How do you deal with the fact that IQ appears to be correlated to income? How you deal with the fact that IQ doesn't correlate to success? Seriously, I don't understand how this makes sense to anyone who has studied stats at all (this is taught to 16 year olds where I am).

This stuff is totally out of this world crazy. I am reasonably intelligent, I did an IQ test when I was 12 and it was 130...I am extremely bad at relatively basic elements of life and work. I am good at other things but there is no way this can all be measured or, even, quantified. What is more: the main thing determining my ability is still experience, and my skills change significantly over the course of a few years. This isn't how statistics or science is really supposed to work. Slightly obviously, and contrary to what people think, this entrenches inequality.

I understand why companies do this:

* Hiring is hard. It is hard to get people who are actually good at hiring, there are no courses for this at university, there are no real rules outside of experience. Ironically, companies get over this by doubling down on their weaknesses.

* Underemployment is massive. It used to be hard to apply for a job, everyone just shotguns apps out now, and no-one has a job they want. Employers can do whatever: I am in the UK, even for menial tasks like working in the supermarket, they are doing weird, totally unscientific tests.

* Everyone is terrified of hiring. Employment lawyers get richer, laws get more complex, and the risk of being villified in the press for an interview gone bad are massive. Ironically, these totally "objective" processes just solidify inequality. They are designed with context, there is no totally abstract notion of intelligence that is relevant to the work place, they are designed to produce stratification in intelligence that likely does not translate to any real-world scenario. These approaches cause the thing they are trying to prevent because the thing has become so terrifying for companies.

Just my 2c, but this stuff is, imo, one of the worst modern corporate behaviour. Whether you think it is right or wrong morally, the outcomes are not good...the solution to bad hiring processes isn't psuedoscience. It is: hiring people who can do their job (again, these are linked, I have noticed that some companies are in the death sprial...they have bad processes that hire bad people, when a company does it well they just exist totally outwith this cycle).

The value provided by this "AI" solution is that it diffuses accountability for a decision away from any individual making a hiring decision. Would it be ethical if it were used to operate a food rationing system, or maybe a vaccine rationing system, and at what point does the level of plenty make it acceptable? I could convolve or convolute any scheme to make the attribute I was selecting for seem "random" and then refuse to acknowledge the views of anyone who couldn't explain gradient descent as well. There may be a general principle here where if you are mediated by machines, you cease to be a person and just represent a sample in a set of samples, and hiring processes like this indicate an economically inferior-good kind of employer that people select away from as soon as they can afford to.

> Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is tricky

Most companies pay a commission to the recruiter or a referral bonus. You could distribute that to those candidates who contribute to the recommendation of the winning candidate. You're incentivized to recommend the best person, because you can still make money even if you don't get the job.

Also you could always hire for a batch of positions, or at least more than one person at a time. That way, just because someone else gets the job doesn't preclude you from also getting it.

"We're the best, because we fire the worst!"

>"solely"

Which presumably means that they can be used as a filter so long as a human is making the final selection.