It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are more likely to be hired on, if your parents are friends with the owner of the company. As for a video interview, I would totally clam-up. If you do want your application to make it to the top of the pile, then what you do is this. Fill the page with white-on-white very tiny words that are designed to hit the AI buzz word detector. You can extract these from the company "Mission Statement" :s
The computers rejecting job applications
31–40 of 261 posts
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#32are resumes valid anymore ?
Yes, just not everywhere. We use them to filter our candidates.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#33This 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."
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 randomness in the screening process.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
AFAIK, photos and birthday are not allowed in US to prevent such discrimination so how would they do it then?
Except they straight up ask you for your racial etnicity, disabilities and gender.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, photos and birthday are not allowed in US to prevent such discrimination so how would they do it then?
I am surprised that Germany hasn't been taken to the European court of human rights over this abuse. Maybe those German privacy activists going after google et all might want to look at this.
Because in Germany/Europe discrimination is officially illegal so it is assumed nobody does it, even though people know better, and because you cannot fully outlaw and police tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is evolutionary ingrained in us as a species since the dawn of man.
Putting more legislative hoops in place means HR will just need to find more creative ways to formulate job requirements in order to exclude certain classes of people or more creative ways of justifying not taking you application further, but ultimately won't solve the core issue.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#36The 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 asada, an excerpt from Moby Dick, and a bunch of windings. But supposedly it's predicted to increase final offer salary by 13.54%, so nobody questions it. Anybody who still writes out their resume by hand is considered a luddite weirdo, and definitely not someone you'd want to have join your company.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#37The obvious connection that we’ll see in the news soon is how companies will combine this with all the digital tracking and profiling being done. Every message somebody sends to a teammate in an online game or discord conversation will be a factor in a job application result 5-10 years later
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#38About 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.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#39I 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.
It doesn't seem like science, or it's selectively chosen science.
If we must do these tests, I should be able to take one or a few of these and keep that as a record and not have to do them again. But instead, I have to repeat the process for every company that gives them (recently, Berkshire-Hathaway and it had to be done before anyone would even speak about the position). These things rarely test for job-specific skills and are supposedly generalized intelligence tests, so the skills should be widely applicable, and therefore I shouldn't have to repeat this often. Hell, I do less for a drivers license renewal and 2 tons of metal at 60 mph is more lethal than most jobs behind these tests. Typically they've been math, reading comprehension, word association, memory, personality, and abstract/spatial thinking, which, frankly, was already done through high school and college. If the goal was finding signals for successful applicants, they already have had these signals.
To me, that says they're less interested in finding out how smart you are, and it's really more of a filtering tool where science is being used to give it more credibility than it deserves.
And of course, referring to the article, because it's AI, there's a gray area of accountability that I don't think the legal process has caught up with yet.
Re: The computers rejecting job applications
#40I 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 a useful, arbitrary, or counterproductive selection criterion for the roles we were hiring for.
(3) It was very clear to us, with a high degree of certainty, that both impressed a LOT of the higher ups
(4) It seemed somewhat clear that both were unlikely to get us sued (note: this is a high bar). However, HireVue (as of a year ago) could not in ANY meaningful way substantiate this claim "AI is more impartial than a human interviewer, as it has no bias," and it angers me that they make that claim.
After conducting a bunch of reviews like this (including other tools), I concluded that most AI recruiting software is a combo of (a) very useful process automation and (b) hocus-pocus, magicical, pseudo-AI. I had people telling me they used supervised learning because they had a team of supervisors in India. I had people telling me they had "Custom AI" when they were just calling some random unverified third party API. And I OFTEN heard nonsense, unverified claims of "unbiased" AI, as if eg training a hiring model using geographical factors won't tell you "don't hire non-college-age people from the south side of Chicago".
If anyone is looking to use recruiting AI, get a good IO psych person and listen to them.