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AI as Talent Scout: Unorthodox Hires, and Maybe Lower Pay (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One day this fall, Ashutosh Garg, the chief executive of a recruiting service called Eightfold.ai, turned up a resume that piqued his interest. It belonged to a prospective data scientist, someone who unearths patterns in data to help businesses make decisions, like how to target ads. But curiously, the resume featured the term "data science" nowhere.
Instead, the resume belonged to an analyst at Barclays who had done graduate work in physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Though his profile on the social network LinkedIn indicated that he had never worked as a data scientist, Eightfold's software flagged him as a good fit. He was similar in certain key ways, like his math and computer chops, to four actual data scientists whom Mr. Garg had instructed the software to consider as a model.
The idea is not to focus on job titles, but "what skills they have," Mr. Garg said. "You're really looking for people who have not done it, but can do it." The power of such technology will be immediately apparent to any employer scrambling to fill jobs in a tight labor market -- not least positions for data scientists, whom companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are competing to attract. Thanks to services like Eightfold, which rely on sophisticated algorithms to match workers and jobs, many employers may soon have access to a universe of prospective workers -- even for hard-to-fill roles -- whom they might not otherwise have come across.
Instead, the resume belonged to an analyst at Barclays who had done graduate work in physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Though his profile on the social network LinkedIn indicated that he had never worked as a data scientist, Eightfold's software flagged him as a good fit. He was similar in certain key ways, like his math and computer chops, to four actual data scientists whom Mr. Garg had instructed the software to consider as a model.
The idea is not to focus on job titles, but "what skills they have," Mr. Garg said. "You're really looking for people who have not done it, but can do it." The power of such technology will be immediately apparent to any employer scrambling to fill jobs in a tight labor market -- not least positions for data scientists, whom companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are competing to attract. Thanks to services like Eightfold, which rely on sophisticated algorithms to match workers and jobs, many employers may soon have access to a universe of prospective workers -- even for hard-to-fill roles -- whom they might not otherwise have come across.
Hello :)
The idea is not to focus on job titles, but "what skills they have,"
Do you ever get the feeling that most business administration is making random decisions, and anything that's slightly better than random, no matter how obvious, is a revolutionary concept?
Particularly for a title as meaningless as "data scientist."
Find the people in positions they obviously shouldn't have, due to zero qualifications and experience. The Trump admin shuts down the next day.
You mean to tell me that when looking for someone to work, you want to actually hire someone that works!?!?!?!
âoeAI Smarter Than Average Recruiter.â
Who theoretically can do it and/so you can pay them less. M'kay - YMMV
Wouldn't this approach be at odds with the time-honored tradition of required qualifications along the lines of "Must have 10 years experience with technology X which has only existed for 5 years"?
It might be lower pay compared to hiring other more experienced data scientists.
But if you are basically taking an almost-data-scientists and hiring them on as one - they are very probably getting what they would consider to be a sizable pay boost.
Not to mention if they turn out to be any good, they are quickly going to be getting large raises to match "real" data scientist, less they get poached by some other company... so that pay being "lower" is either very temporary or non-existent depending on the angle.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The AI (string matching) found a resume with a lot of spammed keywords.
They have to be exposed to everyone in the world, so that others can target them as well, perhaps as a potential threat, or as the person with just enough knowledge to have been writing all those dissenting political or economic papers that have been getting traction among the public recently.
Giving up your privacy and anonymity to the all seeing eye can be quite dangerous, and going forward I can see more and more truly intelligent people finding ways to gain their education off the books, because the current level of recordkeeping and technologically assisted knowledge is making the double edged sword cut more deeply into the individual than into the organizations which can collect the data at the micro level, the cultivate and censor the knowledge at the macro-level for their own benefit.
We truly live in interesting times. The kind of times that are the historical foreshadowing in any dystopian novel.
God you're a boring and pedantic faggot Bill, lol. Your anecdotes are as dishonest and poorly-sourced as your pretense of having a job in the last 25 years. Just the other day you pretended you used your cube-mate's computer to commit crimes and send threats, now you're pretending that it's "astoundingly common" for HR to be run by millenials with piercings... sure you didn't fall asleep and dream with Fox News on again you dishonest bullshit-asserting ancient moron?
What was her name, the liberal-arts female in HR with the nose ring who rejected your ridiculous punk lying ass anyway? I'm sure you remember it, whiner.
One can easily imagine some human HR person wringing their hands, complaining, "But it says 'data scientist' on the job announcement, and this person isn't a 'data scientist'! How am I supposed to check off the box?! This should go in the trash can..."
THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL INCLUDING FOR YOUR BOYFRIEND LIAR BILL
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
wait - don't they already do that? jobs have a laundry list of skills, and linkedin already gives you a bingo card of how you match up - nothing in the process seems to involve creativity, intelligence, problem-solving, or anything else employers say they want from employees - it's just a blind list of skills, so how is this artificial or any other kind of intelligence?
... it put the dain bread recruiters who emphasize job titles out of work.
Not that I ever did but I would have long ago stopped counting the number of recruiters who ask the question: ``What job title are you looking for?'' I'm sure they become completely confused when you tell them that titles are meaningless. I worked in the IT group of a bank's treasury group years ago where anyone and everyone was a vice president. I was once a "member of the technical staff" along with 80% of the engineers at an aerospace firm. At another job "technical specialist" (and the "senior" variant) could mean everything from batch job scheduler to DBA to software developer to sysadmin. Does anyone aspire to be a "Manager I"? Really?
In the age of the ATS that can scan your background for the skills you have, I'm astonished that some recruiters still think a job title has any meaning whatsoever.
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What a fucking gabboosh, shouldn't you be pretending to have a job? You know it's a work day right INCEL Repulbican fakedicks?
They got the NY Times to write an ad for them. Eightfold's marketing department is doing a nice job. NYT writer--not so much.
Possible probnlem - whit if it doesn't choose enough
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Create several aliases
Create specific profiles which are distinct in only a few areas
Then adjust for corrective skillsets
Submit and see what comes back
Based on the fishing expedition you tailor the next profiles slightly to see what patterns emerge...who says that a single resume needs to be sent out...just find the profile which gets the hits and tailor your resume to that pattern
Getting in the door is 90% of the battle.
Recruiting should not be a purely HR function. They are there to enable it, not hinder it by gatekeeping.
If you are a hiring manager, as I have been, insist on seeing all of the resumes and cover letters submitted. You are responsible for the abilities and results of your team, not any recruiter.
What you will find is HR will feel intruded upon if you do anything more than give them a job description.
Captcha: referees
As of now, at least in techy western WA, public school children are issued chromebooks at grade-school level, and are set to use them all the way through high school. Assignments are given, graded, and studied from the google classroom portal. This is giving tech companies unprecedented access to the scholastic performance of our young people, and it scares the shit out of me. I've read the agreement, and it looks like the only concession made is the promise not to send ads to the users while they are on this specific device. I have reached out to the school, the principle, the district IT manager with my privacy concerns regarding this arrangement, but the decision makers love the arrangement, it makes tracking everything easier, keeps the students on task, and provides computer systems to the less fortunate students int he district. None of them even seem to be aware of (or refuse to consider) the possible downstream effects of providing such a complete picture of an entire generations scholastic performance, or the actual value of the massive amount of personal, and scholastic data these systems are providing to a commercial company whos whole model is monetizing this sort of data.
The reasoning I've been provided from the district while working this problem for my own student basically amounts to, "Well nobody else is complaining", and I've been told it is completely voluntary, and I am free to revoke my permission to use the device, which dooms my student to a classroom with no computers at all.
I've given my son permission to use his own device in class, setup a vpn to his workstation at home, and instructed him to use his mobile hotspot for any personal "webbing" he does while at school. So far nobody at the classroom level has taken issue, and they assume I've had success working with the district in securing my student permission to use his own device. As long as he is not caught fucking off in class, or playing AAA games while the rest of em are walled into mathblaster, this should at least last until the end of this year.
I see a future coming into focus that has Alphabet holding nearly perfect information on the perceived abilities of every single body entering the workforce. Algorithms will select candidates for hire (or uni selection) before they even apply, based on perceived abilities gleaned from this arrangement.
I fear that once the effect of such an arrangement is clear, it will be to late to do anything about it.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
So you have stupid things like this at the same time that many experienced people have problems getting interviews, just because the "AI" that recruiters are using skips over many resumes just because of formatting. I know that I've seen and heard from many people who don't get ANY response to their resume, not because of a lack of experience, but because of some mysterious reason. The real problem is when you take humans out of the resume parsing process and you now need a formula resume that is designed just for stupid AI systems.
I hire students to help me prepare taxes in my taxation practice each year. The best student I have had by far was actually a chemistry grad student that decided she didn't like teaching chemistry labs at the college any more. She had a head for numbers and was very intelligent. She had no relevant experience but picked it up on the job faster than anyone I have had in 20 years of teaching students...
I remember talking to a recruiter and he asked me if I had experience in blablabla, which I did, and he said it was odd that it didn't show up. I pointed him to the relevant section and he said that it looked like I'd worked on yaddayadda.
I told him that blablabla is another name for yaddayadda. He said the software didn't know that, and gave me the advice that if something has synonyms find a way to work all of them in.
Though this was some time ago, things have probably improved since then.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most likely they are not getting hired instead of the more experienced scientists. Both are getting hired.
Read the article again. The whole reason they are considering the non-datasci people is - they literally cannot FIND a "real data scientist" to hire! Google et. al. hire them all out of the market with wages smaller companies cannot afford to match.
Sure they probably have room for both, but since they can't find any they at least can have something by hiring in the person that has a good base, just not specifically in data science....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Read the article again. The whole reason they are considering the non-datasci people is - they literally cannot FIND a "real data scientist" to hire!
It's a relatively new area so not everyone who even is 'a real data scientist' has or has had such in a job title. Having worked in the area, perhaps this is the issue I face, or my resume fails to make it clear in a way that algorithms used in this article would pick up on, because certainly firms are not offering me big bucks to join them. Quite the reverse, in fact, as mostly they offer less than I get now.
"Read the article again. The whole reason they are considering the non-datasci people is - they literally cannot FIND a "real data scientist" to hire!"
Because, for them, a "real data scientist" is, more or less, like a "devops progammer": an entelechy. I've developed neural networks for behaviour adaptation; I used Haussdorff dimensions to get quick insights on systems changing patterns; I managed systems entropy, a variety of statistical tools (anova, principal component analysis...)... and, still, I am no a "data scientist" -I don't use Macs and I'm 50 y.o.