Emotion Recognition Systems Could Be Used In Job Interviews (techtarget.com)

dcblogs writes: Emotion recognition software identifies micro-expressions through video analysis. These are expressions that may be as fast as 1/25 of a second and invisible to the human eye, but a close analysis of video can detect them. These systems are being used in marketing research, but some employers may be interested in using them to assess job candidates.

Vendors claim these systems can be used to develop a personality profile and discover a good cultural fit. The technology raises concerns, illustrated earlier this year who showed that face-reading technology could use photographs to determine sexual orientation with a high degree of accuracy.
One company has already added face recognition into their iPad-based time clock, which the company's CEO thinks could be adapted to also detect an employee's mood when they're clocking out. Yet even he has his reservations. While he thinks it could provide more accurate feedback from employees, he also admits that "There's something very Big Brother about it."

Comments

"Hire-Vue" does this

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I applied for an awesome-sounding "general-purpose nerd" job (i.e. "handle all the IT and helpdesk stuff for a small-mid-sized company") for a local company, their HR executive sent me a link to do one of these one-way online improvisational-acting interviews through "Hire-Vue" (they present you, one at a time, with around 5-10 of those now-standard screening-questions, e.g. "What do you know about this company?" or "How would you describe the color yellow to someone who was blind?", etc., then you get 30 seconds to think about the question, then 3 minutes to answer it on video. No advance warning of what the questions might be, nor do you get to re-take.). Then afterwards you get a typical automated "someone will contact you if Hire-Vue decides you're good enough at doing whatever the heck Hire-Vue's algorithms are looking for in your face and voice" email and wait. Unless HR is kind enough to tell you (probably not), you'll never have any idea how you did, and will have a difficult time ever getting better at it without that feedback.

Hire-Vue's schtick seems to be that their mysterious proprietary algorithm does magical "machine learning" analysis of your face and voice in the video answers it took, then it generates a magical "insight score" to tell the HR people whether or not you suck, along with how "confident" and "enthusiastic" and who knows how many other attributes Hire-Vue thinks it can detect (seems to also be special proprietary information, so I don't even really know what it was looking for.) I expect most people get marked down for not making "eye contact" with the webcam (rather than looking at the "person" - i.e. your own live video - on the screen like a normal human being.)

I will say that the process was more fun than I expected, but I'm not at all confident that Hire-Vue's robot won't sabotage my attempt to find gainful employment.

Also note that this format just coincidentally makes it easy to conveniently get an idea of whether you're "old", what your racial background and gender may be, etc., so if they are so inclined, HR can conveniently throw out your application if there's something there that they don't feel like talking to.

It's only been a week, so no idea yet how it went. Job-hunting these days is itself one of the worst jobs right now.

Re:Even more psychopaths in corporations, then

[Anonymous Coward]

The company I work for has a psychopath as a CEO/President.

Besides me hating being in the same room as him (that fake smile, that he points out any sign of weakness or simple guffaws like dropping something on the floor or having a food intolerance, and he specifically draws out shy people to put them on the spot). Oh, and I suppose he performed accounting tricks to overvalue the company when it changed equity group hands.

Naturally the new equity owners want these impossible profit margins, something about a "bank covenant". Now the employees are all paying dearly for it with a hiring freeze on even replacement positions, no raises let alone any bonuses, zero dollars to be spent on R&D, and no office improvements or maintenance unless absolutely trivial like light bulbs.

Oh, and he overpays his dark triad sales buddies. The get a base salary of like $80K, plus almost 16% commission on sales. One machine $750K * 16% = $120K !!! And I'm like, do you want to shave a percent off of that to help the company out? I was laughed at.