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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.
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?
...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".
Generally speaking, those "searching for unicorns" requirements are all about giving corporations an excuse to replace American workers with H1-B foreigners for pennies on the dollar.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
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.
In this case the 'AI' is not really a filter but a set method of evaluating candidates upon the same basis. It is easy to do, simply come up with what ever you deem to be the important values of the job, and score each candidate against those values. Total up the scores and let it make the choice for you. Keep in mind, the potential employees who are best at the interview process are very likely to be psychopaths, smooth charming, shamelessly lying arse holes. Coming up with the correct metrics to score for that position and ensuring you stick to it and strive to apply it uniformly, is the only challenge. Hardly the stuff of AI.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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!