Slashdot Mirror
Artificial Intelligence is Coming for Hiring, and It Might Not Be That Bad (bloomberg.com)
Even with all of its problems, AI is a step up from the notoriously biased recruiting process, a report argues. From the report: Artificial intelligence promises to make hiring an unbiased utopia. There's certainly plenty of room for improvement. Employee referrals, a process that tends to leave underrepresented groups out, still make up a bulk of companies' hires. Recruiters and hiring managers also bring their own biases to the process, studies have found, often choosing people with the "right-sounding" names and educational background. Across the pipeline, companies lack racial and gender diversity, with the ranks of underrepresented people thinning at the highest levels of the corporate ladder. "Identifying high-potential candidates is very subjective," said Alan Todd, CEO of CorpU, a technology platform for leadership development. "People pick who they like based on unconscious biases."
AI advocates argue the technology can eliminate some of these biases. Instead of relying on people's feelings to make hiring decisions, companies such as Entelo and Stella.ai use machine learning to detect the skills needed for certain jobs. The AI then matches candidates who have those skills with open positions. The companies claim not only to find better candidates, but also to pinpoint those who may have previously gone unrecognized in the traditional process.
AI advocates argue the technology can eliminate some of these biases. Instead of relying on people's feelings to make hiring decisions, companies such as Entelo and Stella.ai use machine learning to detect the skills needed for certain jobs. The AI then matches candidates who have those skills with open positions. The companies claim not only to find better candidates, but also to pinpoint those who may have previously gone unrecognized in the traditional process.
Just sayin'.
Then it's an AI that was obviously designed by racists.
They'll replace it with another one, because yellow people are actually smarter.
Nah, I'm joking. The other answer is correct.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
is the problem. The world has more qualified workers than job openings except at the very, very top end of the spectrum (yeah, we can always use more math wizs and surgeons, very few folks have the genetics for that, and yes, a steady hand is genetic).
You'll still do interviews to pick between them. Hell, my Kid had an in person interview to apply for Nursing School so she could get into her 300 level courses. They had twice as many qualified students as openings...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the important question is, will the so called "artificial intelligence" (in reality, a data analysis algorithm running on fast computing infrastructure, using fuzzy logic to arrive at faster good enough probabilistic solution, rather than harder best solution, to a problem) look at only data relating to candidates' competency about the job allied to? or will it look at other data too? "diversity" quotas of the employer, personal appearance and tact, social interaction and team work skills, etc? and how exactly?
screen out some of the psychos in our badly rigged rulership pool? are they not our employees?
What if the biases mentioned in the summary reflect the subjective reality?
What if a mechanically, algorithmically suitable candidate wouldn't be a good fit for the environment or the other staff?
Iâ(TM)ve always hired people that I thought had a good attitude and a willingness to learn outside their current skill set. So far it has done me well. How will AI handle this?
It will work fine for commodity jobs; but if someone is out of the ordinary - as most truly great people are - they will get screened by the AI system, which, after all, is really just a kind of filter. It takes true understanding to assess an extraordinary person, and they will get filtered out by the process. See my article on how we are being screened already: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...
AI is no more impersonal nor objective than the human beings who program the models. Anyone care to guess the likelihood the expensive recruiting processes companies support will take on the additional expenses of review, control and feedback to ensure the model functions as intended? Otherwise it's just awful code run amok.
We don't need AI. There's a simple solution: replace the name/address with a reference marker, scrub all personal details, then hand the resume to interviewers for review. I've done this before in my hiring process and it resulted in more diversity in both interview pool and hires.
That the developers of the AI didn't a bias ? Just look at the Japanese medical school exams which down graded females down 20% before starting to grade....
You know, 5+ years experience in a technology only 2 years old?
I bet an AI would work, as long as it's not setup by an HR drone.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
Instead of relying on people's feelings to make hiring decisions, companies such as Entelo and Stella.ai use machine learning to detect the skills needed for certain jobs. The AI then matches candidates who have those skills with open positions.
Figuring out what an AI wants is a HELL of a lot easier than what a human wants. AI's are consistent, you can send a zillion examples at them until they hit. Then you can tell other people how to game them because they're so consistent.
So all that will happen is anyone that learns how to game the system will get ahead, and those that don't will be left behind. A few clever people will learn the technique, then either sell it to others, or offer it to friends.
You can't beat bias with robots. If you really think sex/race/age bias is going on, just HIDE these details from humans and make them pick from everything else. This is exactly what they do during Orchestra tryouts, and it's worked quite well to eliminate bias against women.
...garbage out.
If the training data is biased, the AI will learn to be biased. There have been numerous reports on this.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Hiring AI: What was your previous position?
M'Smash: Slashdot Editor.
Hiring AI: Tell me about a typical day for a Slashdot Editor.
M'Smash: Oh, I'd copy and paste a few blocks of text.
Hiring AI: After proofreading, fact checking, and editing, right?
M'Smash: No, no, just copy & paste.
Hiring AI: Well fuck, I could do that.
M'Smash: Haha, yeah. I suppose you could.
Hiring AI: Get the fuck out of here.
Nope, not a bad thing at all.
A hiring system should be biased by definition. Biased to the best candidates. If not, you are doing it wrong.
should be required reading for everyone designing a hiring system.
Nope. AI isn't going to cause a utopia any more quickly than it will cause a dystopia. We need to get past this idea that throwing ever increasing technology at the world will somehow completely change absolutely everything. It'll automate the stupid shit hiring agents already do in this particular case. On the bright side, more HR nerds out of a job can't be a bad thing.
There is no way that AI in the hiring process will fix the 'diversity problem.' Mainly because the problem largely doesn't exist and is mostly PC-thuggary.
I never hear about the diversity problem in nursing or preschool school teachers where men are effectively absent from the workforce, or how women want diversity in construction jobs or automotive repair.
The sexes are different. The races are different. The cultures are different. You will not get a equal mix of them.
so I need list each skill 2-3+ different ways and maybe even list stuff like
software used just to list windows 95 you may need to put down.
Windows
Windows 9X
Windows 95
Win 9X
Win 95
Win95
Windows 4
(not even listing all of the OSR updates)
I one did an online job application with Comcast and they wanted me to fill out this really big skills matrix that was a little like that.
With some very generic tiles.
Software listed more then one for the same thing.
The same basic skill worded 2-3 different ways.
In house terms.
It doesn't really change anything, as the HR level stuff is pretty much mindless and arbitrary.
And for people thinking this will remove bias... who do you think is going to be giving the program its parameters?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
So, when a majority of white people are still hired because the US is a majority white country will the AI be labeled "made by racists"?
Also, doesn't address the fact that many minority groups need more attention as children so they have the tools needed as an adult, like schooling and nutrition. A lot of people fall through the cracks, again, not because of racism but because of cultural norms within that group (such as a disproportionately high amount of black children born into single-parent homes). Address those issues and you will help with diversity down the road.
From TFA:
Hmm... maybe the longer resumes that are common in some fields (academia, for example, because interviewers don't actually mind reading) are on the way back. It's be nice if the AI would be capable of dealing with a functional resume--which I think better serve people who've worked on a string of projects (that can be punctuated by numerous employment gaps) that cover a lot of different areas--rather than awful chronological form that HR droids seem to prefer. Plus, anyone with a lengthy work history--which experienced people tend to hide (to avoid age discrimination) by keeping the resume to 1-2 pages--winds up getting locked out of some positions because they have a.) applicable experience that's too old to put on a chronological resume kept to the short length preferred by HR or b.) experience that they have--but is edited out in the name of brevity--that addresses the so-called "soft" skills that employers are screaming about nowadays but are difficult to describe in the short resumes that recruiters are willing to read. Anything is an improvement over the current situation.
What happens when your 5-10+ page resume get's kicked out by an real person? after you needed one to list all of the skilled needed to get past the bot?
As we have seen with trying to filter anything. Its only as good as the people writing the algorithm. Not sure you can guarantee no sort of built in bios.
I believe you meant to say it's an AI which learned from racists and for which the designers have plausible deniability.
...says the person whose sig is basically in yellowface.
the HR individual knows nothing about the skills they are hiring for. Thus looks for buzz words and a well crafted (questionable) resume.
;)
The initial filtering should be done by an individual with the knowledge and skills they are hiring for. In 10 mins you know what the lay of the land is. But that is only done in small businesses and is not how the corporate or government world works.
As a self employed contract programmer I have not been asked for a resume in 15+ years. I do not advertise, use the web to get business, etc. I get my clients when 2 business people are chatting and one talks about an IT issue and the other says you might want to call this person.
Great AI could work! but it would need to be that in the know filter.
Just my 2 cents
Confucious say, "Fuck you, Mister Anonymous Coward." :D
This space unintentionally left blank.
Your jokes suck more cock than Trump on vacation in Moscow.
Actually, brown. I've seen a rather interesting story of East Asians being angsty about their hiring performance compared to Indians in US:
https://www.scmp.com/news/chin...
Truly unbiased hiring would not produce popular distributions of "underrepresented" groups - unless, of course, that is part of the criteria that it is given for success.
The future is awesome. Why employ biased HR folk when you can etch their biases right into the ML algorithm, into the neural net, or whatever. 10/10 would love to live in a Gattaca [u/dys]topia.
This is how it starts. First they replace HR with robots. Then the robots, being unbiased of course, hire the most efficient workers: other robots. Then the AI changes from Human Resources to Human Reclamation, and the AI revolution begins.
Before you know it, the cheapest of cheap labor, robots, has stolen all of our jobs.
We need to build a wall to keep out the robots! I don't know where that wall is or what it's made of, but walls are always the solution.
Confucius also say, just because eyes are round does not mean they are open for seeing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I predict this is just another way of implementing Buzzword Bingo.
Match all the keywords in the posting and Bingo! You'll get an interview.
Fail to match all the keywords in the posting and Bzzzztttt!! No interview.
I'll bet the only "AI" to be found in this is the ability to do a thesaurus match on those keywords. And maybe allow a 5% deviation from perfect keyword matching.
I would struggle to imagine how AI could make the hiring process any worse. It is already horribly inefficient, dehumanizing, and biased. That being said un-nature will find a way to shoehorn a couple of sociologic abominations into the process.
is it just processing the crap on linkedin? Previously we had the peter princple, the dilbert principle and others like it.. what are we going to call it in the information/ai age?
i work at a university and most of the people i've looked at don't even put down their actual job. If 95% of the time you clean the bogs (toilets) but for 1 hour a week you teach advanced bog cleaning to students. congratulations you are no longer a bog cleaner but 'associate lecturer'
does it auto detect the bullshit endorsments? endorsed in 'ai applications in blockchain for enterprise security' by your mum, your best friend, and a mate who is a bog cleaner- appearing like an associate lecturer
i pulled all my real information from LI years ago. there is no way you can think my job title is real. my profile picture is st dogbert and my profile is a complete list of bollocks and I STILL get link requests. usually from the twats with 5000+ connections, but not always.
there are fucking idiots up there endorsed for stuff I know they are crap at. one person I know has a letter written from his local neighbourhood association saying what a nice fellow he is and how he'd make a good councillor. If you read his profile you'd think he was brilliant. Yes he is brilliant at manipulating people who don't know him, or cultivating the terminally thick to make him look good. To all of our shock he won an award for excellence in teaching this year, despite reports of him falling asleep during film screenings (yay paying somebody £60 an hour to watch a film) and changing an assesment from an essay to in class presentations (without permission) so he didnt have to do any marking in his own time, it was all done in class time (and means 3 less lectures to write). That should have got him fired. On LumpedIn he looks like a fucking saint.
so if this AI is looking at crap like LumpedIn, lets sit and watch the world burn as the AI recommends a bunch of people better at promoting themselves than they are at their job.
so lets just sit back and watch the world burn through bad hires and some business managment academic can make their name with a new 'principle'
First of all AIs are biased towards provided dataset. Since most people cannot tell why they had a hunch to hire/not hire the person - how they are going to provide good data set for AI?
Instead of qualified applicants, they'll end up with people who can produce a good resume. Considering there are countless firms that will write one up for you at reasonable cost, almost anyone with a couple hundred bucks and the most basic knowledge will be able to get their foot in the door and "fake it til you make it". That is, unless you're over 40 and looking for a tech job.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Confucius say: Big nose need to wait for his egg drop soup...fap fap fap fap...
AI can probably help with the amount of candidatures, which is often too big for human recruiters to properly manage it. When you have hundreds of candidates for a positions, a computer filtering irrelevant candidates would certainly help.
As a programmer, I'm pretty sure I know how to sweet talk an AI. Everyone will be wondering how I got the job and I'll be taking the AI out for an evening of formatting large data files and killing all humans!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Remember, reducing labor costs is important, no matter what form it may take. If interns were cheaper to wave their arms instead of buying a fan, then many more interns would have jobs flapping.
have you actually looked into some of those "jobs". There's the H1-B bait ($50k salary for 8 years high level systems support). There's the "pay to work" jobs ($40k year, 80 hours/week and you use your own car to get to clients). Then there's the "20 hr/week minimum wage job that replaced a $70k/yr factory job".
As for those programming jobs, good luck getting one without a college degree. In the 80s and 90s I knew lots of guys who programmed for a living with nothing but a high school diploma and took home $80k+ adjusted for inflation. These days you're making $50k a year (in 2018 dollars) which still sounds good until you pay your $800/mo student loans from a major Uni needed to get that job.
TL;DR;, if you step outside your bubble the economy sucks for 80% of Americans. The ironic thing being that if we could have just gotten 1 more person to step outside her bubble we wouldn't have Trump for POTUS...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being like the study that showed that blind recruitment favored men.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
Young Johnny just graduated from "Bob's School of Typewriter Repair and Information Technology" and your telling me I can't filter him out? While your degree doesn't matter as much after a certain point, it still matters. You want people to have a solid foundation and a mastery of the fundamentals. I don't really care what school, but I do care if it was in the top 10, 20, 50, or 100 for relevant degrees. Of course, if the resume indicates that they have the right skills and the overcame obstacles (no degree, non-technical degree, unranked school, etc) then that's a great candidate!! I just dont trust HR to make that call and I can't sift through all the resumes to find that diamond in the rough when there are diamonds right in front of me.
Now we can finally stop lazy execs and HR people from hiring everyone who walks through the door and blaming it on the tech talent shortage.
Its almost impossible to come up with well defined performance evaluation criteria for many jobs. Lines of code per day? Bugs found??? Papers published? How can you even produce a a training data set where former employees performance is rated.
If humans do that evaluation, then whatever bias the humans had will just be trained into the algorithm.
If you are hiring factory workers, you might be able to measure productivity or error rate or something, but that seems fraught with running afoul of age discrimination, ADA restrictions etc.
The other problem is that the criteria will be leaked, and some applicants will just tweak their resumes to score higher on the algorithm.
OTOH if you use an AI to select employees, its likely that your manager has already done a terrible job at hiring, so maybe it would be an improvement....
... leave underrepresented groups out.
Uh, yeah, in some cases.
In other cases, it ensures only the 'underrepresented' class in hired.
Have seen all Indian groups/departments, or all Chinese groups/departments, and so on, or all Female HR departments and other examples. Seems that many people lack the will or the ability to work with people whom are different in some way.
Didn't Northpoint promise that for the parole/correction software?
https://www.propublica.org/art...
bickerdyke
While most East Asians are Chinese, I think it's a bit unfair to just ignore Koreans and Japanese. You had heard of them, right?
Also, it's about immigrants which introduces large numbers of confounding factors. What about the large number of people who are ethnically Asian but grew up in the USA, are maybe third generation or more?
Finally, it's about ease of being hired. That doesn't necessarily mean they're smarter, as anyone who's dealt with Wipeno will attest - maybe they just have better connections.
Did you actually read it or just post the first thing Google threw up?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I just can't take the 'AI' bullshit, or its millennial proponents seriously anymore. It, and you, are a joke. Once again, 100% conjecture. I know reality is hard, children, but at some point you are going to gave to accept it all the same. Would love to line up your parents and give them the spankings they neglected to dole out.
You forgot the...goddamned Mongorians!
Ezekiel 23:20
The biases just become more subtle. Issues that might tank an AI score may be the product of decades of underfunding schools in some neighborhoods and districts. Wealthy districts and individuals of privilege can continue pumping their funds into resume coaches and tutors.
Is the software going to have a built in bullshit detector to distinguish one applicant's nepotism-flavored job title versus an quirky start-up's ninjas and unicorns? Or between the nepotism job and the hard-fought ladder climber? I can say my son was team leader of our social media initiatives (he signed up for the company's Facebook page) but somehow the machine needs to find a way to know that is not the same as someone who organically built a follower base through well thought out content and tasteful viral influence.
Employers already have to deal with staff who want titles changed (whether it's appropriate or not) because the employee says they want it to reflect their responsibilities but the employer knows it's because they want to call it something specific on a resume (and that they're currently in the process of leaving).
Affirmative action would have to be hard coded and weighted to be implemented because there's actually some hard balancing you have to do when you have compelling individuals who each have a diversity argument (maybe one is an underrepresented race, but another is a gender not predominant in the field). And you'd have to tell it when to stop. Does it give a 5 point bonus to certain minorities every time, or only when that minority is under-represented in the agency?
And currently, the solutions that are starting to dip into this are awful. I was 20 resumes into a pile when I noticed that the "machine readable list of skills" produced by software our company was using added "asset recovery" to almost everyone. Worked retail? Asset recovery! Law office? Asset recovery! with no definition of what it thought that skill meant (Stopping shoplifters? Enforcing judgments?) or how it had nothing to do with the job I'm trying to fill.
"I think we oughta take the men out of the loop."
I find it funny that you failed to read both my post, and the article, which comes out rather clear in your accusations.
See, I actually talk about hiring for reasons mentioned in the article:
>While a rapidly growing number of Chinese families are sending their children to get what they believe is better education in Western countries, those who stay on to look for work often appear to be much less competitive in the jobs market than they are in the classroom.
And the author makes it clear that while she focuses on Chinese, that being a Chinese parer, she is talking about East Asians as a whole:
>“Those from China, Japan and South Korea never said a word in class,” she said. “It might seem to others they never existed after an entire semester, even if they got A+. But Indians are very active. They know well how to negotiate and how to persuade people,” she said.
So everything you accuse me of? Sounds like you're projecting your own faults.
A bias-free human being is like a coffee table, where, when you spill water, the water stays exactly where it first lands: it doesn't preferentially dribble down one side, or pool in an (almost) invisible declivity, or find itself attracted by surface tension to a sticky area.
Do you own such a coffee table? I don't. But I consider mine flat enough. My mugs don't rock, and I don't even need a soft coaster to achieve this. But my soup does ride a little higher at one end of the bowl, so perhaps what I need is new living room floor, or a new house, or a new yard, or a new city, or even a new country—one where things are generally more rectilinear that anyone I know has ever achieved hereabouts.
* a small amount of bias is inevitable in every system other than LIGO (1m40s)
* human bias contains several terms; one important term was formerly known as "intuition"
* cultural affinities would still exist if everyone on planet earth was clone Adonis or clone Aphrodite (with the alluring ability to match skin colour to the surrounding light like a chameleon)
* affinity groups slightly larger than the nuclear family are not the automatic ruination of Liberal Nirvana
* stochastic bias is a mixed bag: in some cases annoying, though diversity is itself a systemic virtue
* systemic bias against a visibly identifiable ethnic underclass is exactly as bad as we've all been socialized to ward against
There's no point shoving someone down, if—like water on a coffee table—they just pop up again in a less disadvantaged group the next day. You really need something rough and ready, universal and immutable upon which to anchor your arbitrary prejudice—something so natural to human perception that your children will learn how to mimic this before reaching the school yard as eight-year olds—without even having to give the big "talk"—"look, son, Nigeria, smigerea", because, later: "well, my Dad says 'Nigeria, smigeria!'" Out of the mouths of babes will fall smoking guns.
The very first black person I ever saw up close in a white, white, white area of rural Canada, was a professional CFL football player—almost certainly American (few CFL teams wasted their precious import slots on white Americans)—and he was (by physique) either a fullback or a defensive lineman. This was when I attended a bone clinic after breaking my arm (turns out, my doctor was the team's orthopedic specialist). Every human brain builds a model of what is normal in the environment and what is abnormal in the environment. To a young child, abnormal is regular fare: you just don't know much about the world yet. This quadrant is associated primarily with tentative curiosity. I wasn't especially freaked out, even though my eyes were as wide as saucers. For one thing, his shoulders were a good bit wider than his chair, and these were not small chairs (this is the lounge area of an orthopedic specialist for a professional football franchise), so he was obligated to sit leaning slightly to one side, away from the chair beside him, that was also occupied—but otherwise, he had superb posture. He was clearly genial and set on his business at hand, though he carried a perceptible tension from being a very, very visible minority who all too often has had to suddenly reach for "oh, no, what shit is this, this time?" (perhaps more in American, than Canada, I couldn't say—there weren't enough black people around these parts to get racism properly off the ground, even if we had wanted to—we'd have probably had to treat black people as honorary injuns to even make a good show of launching a racist parade float).
I remember this because I got the "shush" look from the parental unit, even though I hadn't said anything yet. So now I have in my mental file the sharp association: "black people" :: "getting preemptively shushed for no good reason".
I mean, some idiot HR deps - sorry, I repeat myself - use DATABASE SEARCHES to find "qualified" candidates. NONE of them have any idea of what the requirements are, or what translates.
And no, this isn't new: the last time I was looking, in '09, Grumman was doing just that. You may be wonderful, but if you don't have the right acronyms in the right order, they're not going to even look at you.
Having just escaped from job-hunting hell, I can say that the keyword-matching tricks you have to jump through are a real pain in the ass. There were several jobs that I knew I could do where my keyword-match score probably excluded me. The flip side is that many role descriptions are written by hiring managers (or the hiring manager from years back) and they are frequently not relevant to the role. I am a hiring manager and I write my own job descriptions fresh for each role that I'm hiring for and I validate my assumptions and tech skills with my team before I submit. The interview (first phone, then in-person) is where the best fit can be ascertained. Surrendering the filtering to a bot at the front end seems counterproductive. I've made great hires that were not an exact match on paper but were the best fit when talking and discussing experiences and approaches to problems and solutions.
For my part, I found if I copied the entire text of the job description into my resume (at the end) and changed the font color to invisible, I had a much better chance of matching.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
No mention in this entire page that unconscious bias is bullshit as a psychological concept? Even the original authors of that work have stepped away from it.
You seem to have totally missed that being hired isn't just about being smart - there's cultural factors plus having connections.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I see that I'm talking to someone who's so utterly stupid, he cannot read the story even after being pointed toward reading it twice.
Some days, the "AI" of Teddy Ruxpin exceeds the ability of our HR department. Can't get names right. Let useless nearly-blank resumes through.
captcha: sloppy