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

Finally!

[nospam007]

A real use for those Botox injections.

Even more psychopaths in corporations, then

[blind biker]

One thing psychopaths are great at, is simulating emotions. The rest of us get nervous and stumble under certain pressures. Not psychopaths. They will have an even greater advantage if such software is utilized for recruiting.

Re:Even more psychopaths in corporations, then

[ShanghaiBill]

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

Just because you don't like the guy doesn't mean he isn't an effective CEO. Being effective is not the same as being popular.

Psychopaths often make better leaders because they can ignore the emotions, look at the big picture, and make clear utilitarian decisions. This is especially true for military leadership, where a callous and aggressive push for victory will often result in far fewer casualties than cautious dithering.

I Love A Little Voight-Kampff In A Job Interview

[dryriver]

Interviewer: You are in a desert. You: Ok. Interviewer: Bill Gates is also there. He's torturing a little turtle. You: Ok. Interviewer: What do you do? You: I help Bill Gates torture the turtle. Interviewer: Welcome to Microsoft!

Clocking out?

[Rick Zeman]

"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"

Shouldn't they be a bit more concerned about their mood while clocking in?

Re: I Love A Little Voight-Kampff In A Job Intervi

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so close! The correct answer was "roll onto your back and let Bill torture you when he's ready"

what's a tortoise?

[guygo]

"You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you..."

Re:Fake it til Big Brother realizes its fake!

[postbigbang]

There used to be a box, sold sometimes in kit form, that detected micro-tremors in your voice. Some believe that the microtremors, mostly sub-audible, were a sign of deception. There were phone-attachments for them, too. It didn't even take a computer to detect these tremors, or for the device to be thought of as a lie detector.

This was thirty years ago. This is nothing new. Facial recognition is the same way-- finding twitching muscles could be a toothache or a rebuke. Pick one.

Re:Fake it til Big Brother realizes its fake!

[gtall]

Sound's like a management wet dream. I have a better idea, we put management through one of these detectors every morning. If their attitude isn't one of helpfulness to employees, they get sent home with no pay for the day. We'll test them regularly through the day as well just to make sure the attitude is constant.

"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:"Hire-Vue" does this

[HornWumpus]

There have been interviews where about a half hour in, I decided I would rather starve than work there.

After that, it was all about fucking with them. Times already wasted, might as well make something of it.

Re:yeay.

[Scarletdown]

I may only be 50 (or will be the 20th of next month), but even I can remember when the biggest qualifications for getting hired were a desire to work and either an aptitude for the job or willingness to be quickly trained and brought up to speed for the tasks.

Summary Report

[Tablizer]

Candidate 1: Nervous

Candidate 2: Nervous

Candidate 3: Nervous

Candidate 4: Calm, but high

Marketing hype?

[Tony Isaac]

Different people express emotions differently. That's why it's so hard to guess what someone is feeling.

For example, for some people, pausing before responding to a question means they don't know the answer, for others, it means that the person is carefully considering the nuances of a response.

In order to properly understand expressions, context is key. This is true of understanding spoken language as well. Computers are getting pretty good at understanding spoken language, but certainly not better than humans themselves. My guess is that this will be true of understanding emotions for some time.

All this leads me to believe that this is, at least in part, marketing hype.