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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.
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...
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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?
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...
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!!!
Which human that programs the models?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...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".
A hiring system should be biased by definition. Biased to the best candidates. If not, you are doing it wrong.
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
Bullshit, there are a lot of companies with MANY diverse people (I happen to be brown skinned). So, either you are in a very niche area like mining, where non-white don't apply or you are not talking about the present. Tell me where you live and which timeline you are referring to.
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?
If she copied and pasted that would be an improvement. She often introduces spelling, grammatical or factual errors that aren't in the original article.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
Do you want to know how I know you are not an 'HR pro'?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
As someone who has over 35 years of experience as a developer/project lead/manager I could put way more than 2 pages on my resume. But as a hiring manager, I expect your resume to get to the point, and I don't want to wade through 6 pages about your experiences with CICS and Fortran-77 when what I want to know is about things relevant to developing RESTful services in Java on Linux systems. Experience from 20 years ago may be relevant, but you get in the situation where a jack of all trades with 3 years of experience in 5 disparate technologies has to compete with somebody who has 4 years of relevant experience.
Similarly, I will cut some slack to someone who appears to have English as a second language, but at about the third spelling/grammar error I see you are headed for the reject pile - if you can't be bothered to make your resume perfect, I question your attention to detail and ability to write good code.
You should have written a 'long form, machine readable' resume years ago. Just to be processed by HR morons, it needs to be a long list of keywords.
The alternative is to include the keyword list in the margins in 1 pt white on white text.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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!
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?
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...
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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.
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....
" The alternative is to include the keyword list in the margins in 1 pt white on white text."
It is sad that I find that a good tip.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Being an HR "pro" is a very, very bad thing.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
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."
You forgot the...goddamned Mongorians!
Ezekiel 23:20
"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
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.