COMP NEWS – As companies increasingly use AI in their hiring processes, applicants are finding themselves filtered out of roles they may be the perfect fit for.
Body-language analysis. Vocal assessments. Gamified tests. CV scanners. These are some of the tools companies use to screen candidates with artificial intelligence recruiting software. Job applicants face these machine prompts – and AI decides whether they are a good match or fall short.
Businesses are increasingly relying on them. A late-2023 IBM survey of more than 8,500 global IT professionals showed 42% of companies were using AI screening “to improve recruiting and human resources”. Another 40% of respondents were considering integrating the technology.
Many leaders across the corporate world hoped AI recruiting tech would end biases in the hiring process. Yet in some cases, the opposite is happening. Some experts say these tools are inaccurately screening some of the most qualified job applicants – and concerns are growing the software may be excising the best candidates.
“We haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence that there’s no bias here… or that the tool picks out the most qualified candidates,” says Hilke Schellmann, US-based author of the Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future, and an assistant professor of journalism at New York University. She believes the biggest risk such software poses to jobs is not machines taking workers’ positions, as is often feared – but rather preventing them from getting a role at all.
AI hiring processes may even be discriminating against certain applicants based on protected classes. One applicant scored an interview after they resubmitting their application with a younger date of birth.
In one high-profile case in 2020, UK-based make-up artist Anthea Mairoudhiou said her company told her to re-apply for her role after being furloughed during the pandemic. She was evaluated both based on past performance and via an AI-screening programme, HireVue. She says she ranked well in the skills evaluation – but after the AI tool scored her body language poorly, she was out of a job for good. (HireVue, the firm in question, removed its facial analysis function in 2021.) Other workers have filed complaints against similar platforms, says Schellmann.
She adds job candidates rarely ever know if these tools are the sole reason companies reject them – by and large, the software doesn’t tell users how they’ve been evaluated. Yet she says there are many glaring examples of systemic flaws.
In one case, one user who’d been screened out submitted the same application but tweaked the birthdate to make themselves younger. With this change, they landed an interview. At another company, an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed “baseball” or “basketball” – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned “softball” – typically women – were downgraded.
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