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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.
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."
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..."
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.
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.