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

cnn.com

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

#51

Post by AlexCoventry »

drongoking wrote: post #23

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…

It sounds like so far this is only being used as a very coarse, first-pass filter. It'll definitely get gamed, though.

It would be cool if there was a website where applicants could upload their videos and the hiring outcomes, to provide data from which organization's hiring biases could be inferred.

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

#52

Post by mattlondon »

bencollier49 wrote: post #47

Most probably unusable in the UK, as the AI won't be able to explain why it rejected a candidate ("why did you score them low for team working?") and the candidate will take the employer to the cleaners. God only knows what hidden variables it'll start discovering and exploiting. My guess is it'll reinforce well-known prejudices.

I think also it is against the Data Protection Act 2018 (? - IANAL):

49 Right not to be subject to automated decision-making

..(1) A controller may not take a significant decision based solely on automated processing unless that decision is required or authorised by law.

..(2) A decision is a “significant decision” for the purpose of this section if, in relation to a data subject, it—

....(a)produces an adverse legal effect concerning the data subject, or

....(b)significantly affects the data subject.

I'd say that being rejected automatically for a job before being seen by a human would be a significant decision.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/pdfs/ukpga_2018...

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

#53

Post by AlexCoventry »

chrisseaton wrote: post #10
xiphias2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google machine learning was was always used for vetting the 100k+ applications per year that the HR team just doesn't have time to go through. The main goal was to filter people who have the biggest chance to go through the human interviews later in the process. The only reason why it's called ,,AI'' now is because it's trendy. It can be just a simple linear model that takes education (University) and GPA score in…

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?

They do. Google's been asking me to interview with them multiple times a year for almost a decade.

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

#54

Post by AlexCoventry »

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?

I think they were saying the claimed performance of the interview-processing software has got to be fake, not that the article must be. I read it the same way as you at first,though.

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

#56

Post by endothrowho333 »

danpalmer wrote: post #30

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…

Would it be correct to say your brother is also not the type to network with others easily?

An automated system is the last-line in hiring; recommendations -- internal and external -- are the first-line. If one finds themselves in a position where they're manually submitting cold resumes, it's almost always more productive to start networking into the companies you want to work at, and getting the recommendation firsthand, turning your resume into a hot one.

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

#57

Post by existencebox »

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…

Question for you. How do you find good fit for graduates in your niche/good candidates for the role?

My experience consulting was that the spectrum of work I could be asked to do was so broad I'd have trouble, despite having a handful of junior engineer friends, feeling confident I could hand off work to them; let alone a graduate with enough locality to be onsite. (and despite wanting to, as well, I'd love to give them those opportunities while selfishly allowing myself to scale further)

I'm not sure whether this is a problem due to lack of specialization on my part ("big data/distributed system design"), or lack of finding properly aligned graduates; I'd love your take on building those connections.

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

#58

Post by cocire »

t34543 wrote: post #55

Uh, what kind of companies are using AI to screen candidates?

literally all of them? I guess we can pretend that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that scrape resumes for keyword matches aren't some specific definition of "AI" if we want to be naive though

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

#59

Post by perl4ever »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #19
rapind wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's an oversupply of talent in tech then are H1Bs no longer being awarded? Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent. I'm honestly curious how both can be true. Who's lying, or is it simply unwillingness to train local talent?

Related: https://elaineou.com/2017/03/10/technical-interviews-from-th... > 2. A bill for 5 typewriter ribbons and 24 pencils totalled $9.85. If a typewriter ribbon costs $1.25, what is the price of a dozen pencils? > The IBM Programmer Aptitude Test is from 1960 (? I think. It’s tough to read the date on the mimeograph). Is it just me or have technical interviews gotten much harder? > I interviewed for a programmer j…

According to Purdue, the first computer science department in the US was established there in 1962, so of course in 1960 IBM wasn't that selective - they couldn't hire CS graduates. Maybe math majors.

Also, I don't know when CS degrees became common among programmers, but it didn't happen right after they were invented, I'm sure.

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

#60

Post by perl4ever »

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.

There's an old joke that the first cut is or should be made by randomly throwing away a subset of applications, because you don't want to hire someone who is unlucky.
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