14 ms·

A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI

136 points by TuringNYC 7y ago

idclip 7y ago
That sweet, sweet dystopia.
drngdds 7y ago
Revolutionizing hiring bias with the power of deep learning!
jimbob45 7y ago
This has got to be a fake. The only way AI would be able to make any sort of correct judgment about someone's probable future performance is if it had some training set of data of employees who had their interviews recorded and who were known to be bad in some way. However, it's still a massive leap in logic to be able to correlate anything an AI could observe to some tangibly bad behavior later on. I'm thinking the promises of this technology will never be realized.
- stopads 7y ago
  Google and other large tech giants have been working on precisely that sort of AI with those types of data for at least 10 years now. They are famous for tinkering with their hiring process based on mountains of data, with mostly bad results. Which aspect do you find farfetched?
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    At Google machine learning was was always used for vetting the 100k+ applications per year that the HR team just doesn't have time to go through. The main goal was to filter people who have the biggest chance to go through the human interviews later in the process. The only reason why it's called ,,AI'' now is because it's trendy. It can be just a simple linear model that takes education (University) and GPA score into account. The simplest way to skip these filters is to get a reference from a person who already works at the company.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      I wonder why ultra-elite companies like Google don't swap to a model where they reach out to people they want to hire, rather than accepting random applications?
      - orbifold 7y ago
        They reach out to people regularly based on their GitHub profile for example.
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        They do reach out to people they want to urge to apply; the set of people they "want to hire" is pretty small.
        glandium 7y ago
        They reach out to people, but those people end up in the same bucket as everyone else.
      - pja 7y ago
        Google employees a team of recruiters to do exactly this.
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        I know - I meant why do they also have an open mailbox for millions of people not remotely qualified (I presume) to spam into, creating this problem for themselves. If you’re at the level of working for Google you’re presumably already at the absolute top of your field internationally and will know people at Google you can reach out to personally.
        detaro 7y ago
        Google hires tons of people fresh out of university, they're not going to be "at the absolute top of their field" or well-connected. (they do seem to hire previous interns a lot, but that moves the filter having to handle the flood to people applying for internships instead)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bradleyjg 7y ago
    I don't buy that the training set is any good.
  - mistrial9 7y ago
    confirm that at least one UC Berkeley affiliated PR was paid quite a lot of money to do exactly this kind of work for several years, that was five years ago at least.. they did not use bombastic terms to describe the project, evoking the authority aspect, instead they used language that signaled "finding hidden talent"
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    I think they were saying the claimed performance of the interview-processing software has got to be fake, not that the article must be. I read it the same way as you at first,though.
- matheweis 7y ago
  Not sure on the current state of things on the recruiting side but it was tried at Amazon. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t run it again (if they aren’t already) if they can solve some of the problems discussed https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio... I’m not too worried about the long game though, humans are proving to be quite adaptable with tools like this one; an AI that optimizes your resume to match a given job description: https://www.jobscan.co/ https://www.jobscan.co/
- LeftHandPath 7y ago
  I am not sure where I heard it, but I keep coming back to the quote "There is no algorithm for absolute truth". People who aren't in-the-know about AI tend to lend it much more credit, when it comes to its ability to accurately measure something, than is due.
  - bsenftner 7y ago
    There is no scientific method to recover, access, or identify another consciousnesses mental state short of asking them, and then you must deal with the possibility of their answer being incorrect due to a entire complex world of reasons. This class of "AI" is pure fraud.
- jmull 7y ago
  You're right in that there's no reason to believe AI can do this effectively. However, in my experience, HR departments and hiring processes are anything but rational. HRs buy any kind of snake oil by the barrel, and hiring managers generally reach their position for reasons entirely unrelated to the ability to identify and hire above average employees.
  - bsenftner 7y ago
    HR departments are by definition on the defensive, that is a large part of what "human resources" is - a legal shield department to make sure employees stay in their lanes, with employment and legal threats as guardrails. All they need is a few pop culture articles saying these "truth/personality/job filtering AIs" are liability traps, and they will cease to be popular instantly. HR is a fear driven department, play on that.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  Absolutely, without this it is just snapshotting and compressing the particular biases of the interviewers in the training set, in a lossy way, not training against ground truth (good hire // bad hire)
- bsenftner 7y ago
  In my opinion, this abuse of "AI" is criminal fraud. It is simply not possible to do what they claim. The entire "industry" of companies offering these services need to be investigated and shut down.
jimthrow 7y ago
The vast oversupply of talent has gotten so large employers can’t even be bothered to read resumes anymore: Ai will. This is what happens when ever larger percentage of society gets more and more degrees
- rapind 7y ago
  If there's an oversupply of talent in tech then are H1Bs no longer being awarded? Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent. I'm honestly curious how both can be true. Who's lying, or is it simply unwillingness to train local talent?
  - theevilsharpie 7y ago
    > Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent. > I'm honestly curious how both can be true. There's an overwhelming number of applicants. That says nothing about their qualifications. I don't know what Big Tech's numbers look like, but when I did hiring, the percentage of applicants that were even remotely qualified was usually in the single digits.
    - rapind 7y ago
      Sounds like an education/ training problem then?
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        There's a certain amount of innate talent involved in any profession, so additional training and education is unlikely to help. No amount of education or training would ever turn me into a professionally successful artist, for example.
      - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
        Perhaps there is just a small group of people who apply for every job and are continually rejected. Whereas most good people aren't really applying for any jobs or very few.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
I think job applicants should have to compete with eachother in a craps tournament. Losers are knocked out of the pool until the number of applicants matches the number of open positions. I also think this is how we should choose the president.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  Wikipedia has an article on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition tl;dr: the method works.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  There's an old joke that the first cut is or should be made by randomly throwing away a subset of applications, because you don't want to hire someone who is unlucky.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    But seriously, I think it is probably a good idea, if you have to throw out 90% of applications to start, to do it randomly if the alternative is a dubious statistical or ML-derived model. It would make me feel better from the point of view of hiring or as a candidate, not to have the risk of an unforeseen undesirable bias.
drongoking 7y ago
Whenever I see AI used for something like this, right after thinking "our dystopia is here," I wonder how it could be gamed. An experienced interviewer can tell when they're being told what they want to hear; I suspect an AI could not. The AI ends up rewarding preparation and acting skills. And when you make too many hoops for people to jump through, eventually you find you're just selecting for those who are good at hoop-jumping.
- dpau 7y ago
  i wonder the same thing, it's an arms race, perhaps someone will release a counter-measure like the chinese meitu (http://global.meitu.com/ http://global.meitu.com/) that is trained against these types of ai's..
- randycupertino 7y ago
  I also think you're self-selecting for desperate people who couldn't get jobs elsewhere, as most in-demand candidates would not put up with this nonsense. I know when I was looking, anywhere that had one of those 100-question inane personality tests ("Would you rather lead a meeting, or go skydiving?") etc I would bow out of the application process.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    On the other hand, consider the position that had a 100-question personality test was never intended for a competitive candidate like you. It was intentionally crafted for the desperate job seeker who might take a lower wage.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  It sounds like so far this is only being used as a very coarse, first-pass filter. It'll definitely get gamed, though. It would be cool if there was a website where applicants could upload their videos and the hiring outcomes, to provide data from which organization's hiring biases could be inferred.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  I don't see a meaningful distinguishment between AI-driven hoop-jumping and in-person. When whatever you're measuring before becomes publicly known, it immediately becomes useless -- anyone can optimize for it. Humans are equally as likely as AI to reward preparation and acting skills, especially since suffer from implicit bias.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I consult. When its remote, I sometimes recommend we have a person on the ground (at the customer plant) to coordinate and manage data. If they don't agree, I hire a graduate anyway and ask that a place be made in their office for them. Ultimately the client find them useful and they get hired on, because the client actually did need somebody to be expert in the new software. It's a responsibility to help young graduates find an entry to a company. All it takes is that first entry.
- masterjefferson 7y ago
  We need more folks like you.
- bordercases 7y ago
  How much of the training people is going to become underutilized because of hidden and poor optimization metrics? Thank you so much.
- existencebox 7y ago
  Question for you. How do you find good fit for graduates in your niche/good candidates for the role? My experience consulting was that the spectrum of work I could be asked to do was so broad I'd have trouble, despite having a handful of junior engineer friends, feeling confident I could hand off work to them; let alone a graduate with enough locality to be onsite. (and despite wanting to, as well, I'd love to give them those opportunities while selfishly allowing myself to scale further) I'm not sure whether this is a problem due to lack of specialization on my part ("big data/distributed system design"), or lack of finding properly aligned graduates; I'd love your take on building those connections.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Sure. It generally goes like this: they think they want another Engineer, but what they/I need on site is a project coordinator/manager type. That's where they drag their heels on hiring somebody. So I hire a Journalism or Business graduate, give them mentoring for the first month on-site, and being young and ambition they take off. The principle thing in dealing with an Engineering organization (I tell them) is, when you don't understand what they're saying, say "I don't understand that. Can you elaborate?" Engineers generally love to explain their stuff. And it doesn't hurt to appear humble and eager either. Anyway it works for what I've been doing (data migration, engineering data management, test fixture setup and deployment) since its more software configuration and vendor selection than it is technical Engineering. More a planning and coordination role. Especially since the departments I get injected into are already busy, and are glad to offload non-Engineering tasks. It's a situation that's rich with opportunities to make yourself legitimately useful and productive. So the right candidate is not chosen so much by credentials, as skills in organizing, communicating and following up. One very successful example had been a manager for an Americorp section, looking after 20+ young people as young as himself, and keeping them motiviated, supplied and supported. This person is now being groomed for a higher-level management position in the service company I introduced him into. I expect to see him as a Director or VP one day. Btw, it doesn't hurt to have somebody at client companies that feels predisposed to look favorably on my services. Not only can I continue to get connected to whomever it takes to get a contract moving, I have a positive voice in their meeting rooms supporting us.
modzu 7y ago
the fear mongering in here is interesting. "secret, unproven" algorithms (much less intelligent than anything developed with machine learning) already control an individuals access to all sorts of things, like college, credit, insurance, etc. there is a positive side to approaching this problem and more humans is never going to be it.
- empath75 7y ago
  Credit ratings aren’t secret.
  - modzu 7y ago
    no, the models that generate the scores are.
danpalmer 7y ago
My brother has just finished a masters programme and is starting to apply for jobs, he's coming up against a lot of these. He's smart, motivated, very hard working, and has the necessary credentials on his CV, but when talking to him he's quite monotone and low energy. Because of this, he's failing these automated video interviews as he looks like he's not a "team player" or "personable". While interviewing practice is becoming more aware of bias against things like this, the training data for these "AI" systems are going to be based on those interviews conducted in the past, often with questionable outcomes. The software is sold as helping "remove bias", but it instead pulls interview bias forwards in more extreme ways to the CV-review stage, preventing candidates from ever getting in front of a human. While multiple humans on a hiring team may overcome some of their biases working together, a single piece of software trained to look for stereotypes will exacerbate those biases.
- DenisM 7y ago
  That’s just awful. So much for cognitive diversity, eh? I wish your brother best of luck.
- austenallred 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, how do you know that’s why he’s not being hired?
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    They give automated feedback about your rating.
- endothrowho333 7y ago
  Would it be correct to say your brother is also not the type to network with others easily? An automated system is the last-line in hiring; recommendations -- internal and external -- are the first-line. If one finds themselves in a position where they're manually submitting cold resumes, it's almost always more productive to start networking into the companies you want to work at, and getting the recommendation firsthand, turning your resume into a hot one.
gotdvoted9392 7y ago
Been going on about giving our neighbors too much political power by allowing things like HR to filter for the sort who will shut their head off and follow orders. Get downvoted every time. A desire for top down control of life at scale hasn’t gone away with the fading of church life. That’s emotional memory living in the limbic system still. Perfectly reasonable to use a control technique on the masses. The math of economics is right, in the proper combining and separating of numbers is present, they don’t make 2+2 = 4. It’s what the quantities represent (us), and who controls the weights (not us) that matter. It’s politically indefensible to enable extreme ownership over property. They believe it gives them control over agency since only they own the useful machines. On the upside private army ownership is at an all time low and they need us to manage these machines at scale One day of peacefully staying home or even just a serious enough push to make it look like that is happening (remember SOPA blackout and teacher strikes), this goes away and we can work on our own ideas. Probably just get downvoted again for suggesting no way all these people are confused like I think. But sitting on their hands going along erodes their political capital and empowers threats to our own agency at scale. The government should guarantee healthcare and military security to short circuit gamesmanship of private power. We ditched the idea of a king in political contexts, but kept it alive in daily life contexts. Serve your CEO A minority of rich elites are not important enough literally to give them broad ownership of ideas we individually literally imagine up and build.
anon463637 7y ago
"GATTACA II: The Revenge of The Robots" Hello human, please submit blood sample, hair sample and credit history into the data port at one of the kiosks to the front in an orderly fashion. (A sea of people line up and queue to the front.) Number 139 - approved Number 445 - approved All other applicants check back tomorrow for additional opportunity updates. Thank you for applying to Tyrell Corporation. Goodbye.
blakesterz 7y ago
Maybe an even better headline would be "A new obstacle to landing a job: getting approved by AI" Doesn't this same problem exist for anyone finding a job? It's probably even worse when you're looking and your 40 or 50 and even worse if you're changing careers. I'd bet AI drops anyone over the age of 40, almost certainly 50. I'm not saying "these darn kids have it so easy today" I'm sure it's not, but my 1/2 educated guess is that the older you get the harder it gets to make it past these algorithms.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- rayhendricks 7y ago
  If they did that would be insta-lawsuit. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
- john_moscow 7y ago
  Hey, that opens a great business niche for face decoration kits that would add X% to your average interview score. /s
bencollier49 7y ago
Most probably unusable in the UK, as the AI won't be able to explain why it rejected a candidate ("why did you score them low for team working?") and the candidate will take the employer to the cleaners. God only knows what hidden variables it'll start discovering and exploiting. My guess is it'll reinforce well-known prejudices.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  I think also it is against the Data Protection Act 2018 (? - IANAL): 49 Right not to be subject to automated decision-making ..(1) A controller may not take a significant decision based solely on automated processing unless that decision is required or authorised by law. ..(2) A decision is a “significant decision” for the purpose of this section if, in relation to a data subject, it— ....(a)produces an adverse legal effect concerning the data subject, or ....(b)significantly affects the data subject. I'd say that being rejected automatically for a job before being seen by a human would be a significant decision. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/pdfs/ukpga_20180012_en.pdf https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/pdfs/ukpga_2018...
- johnnycab 7y ago
  It will be hard to predict what will be considered unusable post-brexit. Although, I don't know how an algorithm will be able to adhere to a mish-mash of job requirements laid down by Dom Cummings for running the government, which involves assorted wierdos juxtaposed with data scientists and Y-Combinator alumni. However, if people like Uri Geller keep applying, it will at least keep the HR bods in gravy.
- retrac 7y ago
  I'm quite hard of hearing. I wonder what the algorithm's analysis of "facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant's voice" would supposedly reveal about me. Probably something actionable under the nondiscrimination laws here, thankfully.
  - bencollier49 7y ago
    "I didn't like the look of him" certainly isn't an acceptable answer, and it's literally the answer in this case, always.
t34543 7y ago
Uh, what kind of companies are using AI to screen candidates?
- cocire 7y ago
  literally all of them? I guess we can pretend that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that scrape resumes for keyword matches aren't some specific definition of "AI" if we want to be naive though
code4tee 7y ago
The flip side is that top talent won’t want to put up with the BS so a lot of these companies end up shooting themselves in the foot to save a few bucks on recruiting.
bsenftner 7y ago
Pure fraudulent AI snake oil. Where is a hungry lawyer that wants to team up with computer scientists and take down these predator companies. There is serious wealth to be had by exposing these con men, and a hell of a lot of misery to be halted.
acd 7y ago
In europe it may not be legal to use AI based decision making. According to article 22 of GDPR. "Automated individual decision-making, including profiling" https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
novok 7y ago
This is a modern version of those personality surveys that low rent jobs would give to potential employees.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
This is why I am very skeptical when companies, especially tech companies, go running to Congress wanting more imported labor. They're ignoring qualified applicants left and right due to processes that are optimized to minimize the risk of ever making a bad hire even though it filters out lots of good hires. Fix your process before expecting laws to be changed to ameliorate the negatives of the process you chose.
FpUser 7y ago
I am thinking at what point all those "business innovations" will turn democracy and freedom into a corporate gulag. What's the point of having so called free and democratic government system if you'd be back to USSR 5 days a week from 9 to 5.
john_moscow 7y ago
While I agree that using AI to rank the candidates based on their responses to pre-recorded videos is dystopian, I would like to point out that it only works in the environments where: a) The supply of candidates greatly outweighs demand. b) There is no clear way to assess the individual candidate's impact on the business' ability to make money, and the employees are essentially commoditized. These environments have been known to be toxic for a while: filtering people based on bullshit 20-page personality questionnaires, managers hiring the most desperate ones who would tolerate the most humiliation from them, while every part of the process trying to a wink-wink nudge-nudge to others in order to land their nephew on a cushy position. While AI definitely starts another round in the battle, I would advise anyone who's sick of this bullshit to focus on the economic output of their prospective position. If a company is looking for an AI engineer that can halve the size of their inference model without losing more than 1% of accuracy, they won't waste time scoring your story about your weak sides. They will look at your thesis and hire you if you already did something similar. The problem is that most of the jobs these days are about sitting quiet in a friendly team and smiling when the CEO shows off the team to the next round of potential investors. But those jobs won't give you much growth, and will end your career once you don't look young and cool anymore.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  "I would like to point out that it only works in the environments where" No, it does not work at all. It is fraud, and needs to be treated as a criminal enterprise.
mentalstate 7y ago
having graduated during the worst recession in 80 years, i am finding sympathy hard to muster
sticky_thrrwwwy 7y ago
I tried to apply for a in-between job at a large outdoor store. They wanted me to use the HireVue software. Unfortunately, there was no way to appeal; the email link they sent was one of those "noreply@contractcompany.com" deals.
djokkataja 7y ago
It doesn't make sense to evaluate someone's abilities to interact with other people based on how they talk to a camera while alone.
trashface 7y ago
It seems like small companies using this will probably fail. They will hire batches of AI-approved, but actually bad candidates. Or they will go long periods without being able to hire for core positions because they "can't find anyone". Both eventually result in the company going out of business. But government or big companies, well, its just bad news there, since they can't fail. They will just get more incompetent.
nitwit005 7y ago
Just seems like a way to lose a lawsuit. All you need is some handicapped client the system can't understand, or a demonstration that it's biased against an accent, and that's all it'll take.
- dpflan 7y ago
  The customer could blame the service provider - especially when the provider stresses how unbiased they aim to be. But then negligence by the customer is an issue too. I agree with you — bias in ML systems exists and applying it to more facets of life is tricky and snake-oil can be tasty, but this does also surface issues that require standards and assessments of bias.
thewileyone 7y ago
Soon it would just be via a blood test, like Gattaca.
chayesfss 7y ago
I’ve thought for years a SaaS app could be created that elevates a prospects chances of a call. I’d have to hire folks to work alg but we could take their resume and apply to job with a very high score

136 points by TuringNYC 7y ago

idclip 7y ago

That sweet, sweet dystopia.

drngdds 7y ago

Revolutionizing hiring bias with the power of deep learning!

jimbob45 7y ago

This has got to be a fake. The only way AI would be able to make any sort of correct judgment about someone's probable future performance is if it had some training set of data of employees who had their interviews recorded and who were known to be bad in some way. However, it's still a massive leap in logic to be able to correlate anything an AI could observe to some tangibly bad behavior later on. I'm thinking the promises of this technology will never be realized.

stopads 7y ago
Google and other large tech giants have been working on precisely that sort of AI with those types of data for at least 10 years now. They are famous for tinkering with their hiring process based on mountains of data, with mostly bad results. Which aspect do you find farfetched?
- xiphias2 7y ago
  At Google machine learning was was always used for vetting the 100k+ applications per year that the HR team just doesn't have time to go through. The main goal was to filter people who have the biggest chance to go through the human interviews later in the process. The only reason why it's called ,,AI'' now is because it's trendy. It can be just a simple linear model that takes education (University) and GPA score into account. The simplest way to skip these filters is to get a reference from a person who already works at the company.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    I wonder why ultra-elite companies like Google don't swap to a model where they reach out to people they want to hire, rather than accepting random applications?
    - orbifold 7y ago
      They reach out to people regularly based on their GitHub profile for example.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      They do reach out to people they want to urge to apply; the set of people they "want to hire" is pretty small.
      - glandium 7y ago
        They reach out to people, but those people end up in the same bucket as everyone else.
    - pja 7y ago
      Google employees a team of recruiters to do exactly this.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        I know - I meant why do they also have an open mailbox for millions of people not remotely qualified (I presume) to spam into, creating this problem for themselves. If you’re at the level of working for Google you’re presumably already at the absolute top of your field internationally and will know people at Google you can reach out to personally.
        detaro 7y ago
        Google hires tons of people fresh out of university, they're not going to be "at the absolute top of their field" or well-connected. (they do seem to hire previous interns a lot, but that moves the filter having to handle the flood to people applying for internships instead)
- deleted 7y ago
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- bradleyjg 7y ago
  I don't buy that the training set is any good.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  confirm that at least one UC Berkeley affiliated PR was paid quite a lot of money to do exactly this kind of work for several years, that was five years ago at least.. they did not use bombastic terms to describe the project, evoking the authority aspect, instead they used language that signaled "finding hidden talent"
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  I think they were saying the claimed performance of the interview-processing software has got to be fake, not that the article must be. I read it the same way as you at first,though.
matheweis 7y ago
Not sure on the current state of things on the recruiting side but it was tried at Amazon. I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t run it again (if they aren’t already) if they can solve some of the problems discussed https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio... I’m not too worried about the long game though, humans are proving to be quite adaptable with tools like this one; an AI that optimizes your resume to match a given job description: https://www.jobscan.co/ https://www.jobscan.co/
LeftHandPath 7y ago
I am not sure where I heard it, but I keep coming back to the quote "There is no algorithm for absolute truth". People who aren't in-the-know about AI tend to lend it much more credit, when it comes to its ability to accurately measure something, than is due.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  There is no scientific method to recover, access, or identify another consciousnesses mental state short of asking them, and then you must deal with the possibility of their answer being incorrect due to a entire complex world of reasons. This class of "AI" is pure fraud.
jmull 7y ago
You're right in that there's no reason to believe AI can do this effectively. However, in my experience, HR departments and hiring processes are anything but rational. HRs buy any kind of snake oil by the barrel, and hiring managers generally reach their position for reasons entirely unrelated to the ability to identify and hire above average employees.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  HR departments are by definition on the defensive, that is a large part of what "human resources" is - a legal shield department to make sure employees stay in their lanes, with employment and legal threats as guardrails. All they need is a few pop culture articles saying these "truth/personality/job filtering AIs" are liability traps, and they will cease to be popular instantly. HR is a fear driven department, play on that.
mattnewton 7y ago
Absolutely, without this it is just snapshotting and compressing the particular biases of the interviewers in the training set, in a lossy way, not training against ground truth (good hire // bad hire)
bsenftner 7y ago
In my opinion, this abuse of "AI" is criminal fraud. It is simply not possible to do what they claim. The entire "industry" of companies offering these services need to be investigated and shut down.

jimthrow 7y ago

The vast oversupply of talent has gotten so large employers can’t even be bothered to read resumes anymore: Ai will. This is what happens when ever larger percentage of society gets more and more degrees

rapind 7y ago
If there's an oversupply of talent in tech then are H1Bs no longer being awarded? Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent. I'm honestly curious how both can be true. Who's lying, or is it simply unwillingness to train local talent?
- theevilsharpie 7y ago
  > Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent. > I'm honestly curious how both can be true. There's an overwhelming number of applicants. That says nothing about their qualifications. I don't know what Big Tech's numbers look like, but when I did hiring, the percentage of applicants that were even remotely qualified was usually in the single digits.
  - rapind 7y ago
    Sounds like an education/ training problem then?
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      There's a certain amount of innate talent involved in any profession, so additional training and education is unlikely to help. No amount of education or training would ever turn me into a professionally successful artist, for example.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      Perhaps there is just a small group of people who apply for every job and are continually rejected. Whereas most good people aren't really applying for any jobs or very few.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

I think job applicants should have to compete with eachother in a craps tournament. Losers are knocked out of the pool until the number of applicants matches the number of open positions. I also think this is how we should choose the president.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
Wikipedia has an article on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition tl;dr: the method works.
perl4ever 7y ago
There's an old joke that the first cut is or should be made by randomly throwing away a subset of applications, because you don't want to hire someone who is unlucky.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  But seriously, I think it is probably a good idea, if you have to throw out 90% of applications to start, to do it randomly if the alternative is a dubious statistical or ML-derived model. It would make me feel better from the point of view of hiring or as a candidate, not to have the risk of an unforeseen undesirable bias.

drongoking 7y ago

Whenever I see AI used for something like this, right after thinking "our dystopia is here," I wonder how it could be gamed. An experienced interviewer can tell when they're being told what they want to hear; I suspect an AI could not. The AI ends up rewarding preparation and acting skills. And when you make too many hoops for people to jump through, eventually you find you're just selecting for those who are good at hoop-jumping.

dpau 7y ago
i wonder the same thing, it's an arms race, perhaps someone will release a counter-measure like the chinese meitu (http://global.meitu.com/ http://global.meitu.com/) that is trained against these types of ai's..
randycupertino 7y ago
I also think you're self-selecting for desperate people who couldn't get jobs elsewhere, as most in-demand candidates would not put up with this nonsense. I know when I was looking, anywhere that had one of those 100-question inane personality tests ("Would you rather lead a meeting, or go skydiving?") etc I would bow out of the application process.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  On the other hand, consider the position that had a 100-question personality test was never intended for a competitive candidate like you. It was intentionally crafted for the desperate job seeker who might take a lower wage.
AlexCoventry 7y ago
It sounds like so far this is only being used as a very coarse, first-pass filter. It'll definitely get gamed, though. It would be cool if there was a website where applicants could upload their videos and the hiring outcomes, to provide data from which organization's hiring biases could be inferred.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I don't see a meaningful distinguishment between AI-driven hoop-jumping and in-person. When whatever you're measuring before becomes publicly known, it immediately becomes useless -- anyone can optimize for it. Humans are equally as likely as AI to reward preparation and acting skills, especially since suffer from implicit bias.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I consult. When its remote, I sometimes recommend we have a person on the ground (at the customer plant) to coordinate and manage data. If they don't agree, I hire a graduate anyway and ask that a place be made in their office for them. Ultimately the client find them useful and they get hired on, because the client actually did need somebody to be expert in the new software. It's a responsibility to help young graduates find an entry to a company. All it takes is that first entry.

masterjefferson 7y ago
We need more folks like you.
bordercases 7y ago
How much of the training people is going to become underutilized because of hidden and poor optimization metrics? Thank you so much.
existencebox 7y ago
Question for you. How do you find good fit for graduates in your niche/good candidates for the role? My experience consulting was that the spectrum of work I could be asked to do was so broad I'd have trouble, despite having a handful of junior engineer friends, feeling confident I could hand off work to them; let alone a graduate with enough locality to be onsite. (and despite wanting to, as well, I'd love to give them those opportunities while selfishly allowing myself to scale further) I'm not sure whether this is a problem due to lack of specialization on my part ("big data/distributed system design"), or lack of finding properly aligned graduates; I'd love your take on building those connections.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Sure. It generally goes like this: they think they want another Engineer, but what they/I need on site is a project coordinator/manager type. That's where they drag their heels on hiring somebody. So I hire a Journalism or Business graduate, give them mentoring for the first month on-site, and being young and ambition they take off. The principle thing in dealing with an Engineering organization (I tell them) is, when you don't understand what they're saying, say "I don't understand that. Can you elaborate?" Engineers generally love to explain their stuff. And it doesn't hurt to appear humble and eager either. Anyway it works for what I've been doing (data migration, engineering data management, test fixture setup and deployment) since its more software configuration and vendor selection than it is technical Engineering. More a planning and coordination role. Especially since the departments I get injected into are already busy, and are glad to offload non-Engineering tasks. It's a situation that's rich with opportunities to make yourself legitimately useful and productive. So the right candidate is not chosen so much by credentials, as skills in organizing, communicating and following up. One very successful example had been a manager for an Americorp section, looking after 20+ young people as young as himself, and keeping them motiviated, supplied and supported. This person is now being groomed for a higher-level management position in the service company I introduced him into. I expect to see him as a Director or VP one day. Btw, it doesn't hurt to have somebody at client companies that feels predisposed to look favorably on my services. Not only can I continue to get connected to whomever it takes to get a contract moving, I have a positive voice in their meeting rooms supporting us.

modzu 7y ago

the fear mongering in here is interesting. "secret, unproven" algorithms (much less intelligent than anything developed with machine learning) already control an individuals access to all sorts of things, like college, credit, insurance, etc. there is a positive side to approaching this problem and more humans is never going to be it.

empath75 7y ago
Credit ratings aren’t secret.
- modzu 7y ago
  no, the models that generate the scores are.

danpalmer 7y ago

My brother has just finished a masters programme and is starting to apply for jobs, he's coming up against a lot of these. He's smart, motivated, very hard working, and has the necessary credentials on his CV, but when talking to him he's quite monotone and low energy. Because of this, he's failing these automated video interviews as he looks like he's not a "team player" or "personable". While interviewing practice is becoming more aware of bias against things like this, the training data for these "AI" systems are going to be based on those interviews conducted in the past, often with questionable outcomes. The software is sold as helping "remove bias", but it instead pulls interview bias forwards in more extreme ways to the CV-review stage, preventing candidates from ever getting in front of a human. While multiple humans on a hiring team may overcome some of their biases working together, a single piece of software trained to look for stereotypes will exacerbate those biases.

DenisM 7y ago
That’s just awful. So much for cognitive diversity, eh? I wish your brother best of luck.
austenallred 7y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you know that’s why he’s not being hired?
- danpalmer 7y ago
  They give automated feedback about your rating.
endothrowho333 7y ago
Would it be correct to say your brother is also not the type to network with others easily? An automated system is the last-line in hiring; recommendations -- internal and external -- are the first-line. If one finds themselves in a position where they're manually submitting cold resumes, it's almost always more productive to start networking into the companies you want to work at, and getting the recommendation firsthand, turning your resume into a hot one.

gotdvoted9392 7y ago

Been going on about giving our neighbors too much political power by allowing things like HR to filter for the sort who will shut their head off and follow orders. Get downvoted every time. A desire for top down control of life at scale hasn’t gone away with the fading of church life. That’s emotional memory living in the limbic system still. Perfectly reasonable to use a control technique on the masses. The math of economics is right, in the proper combining and separating of numbers is present, they don’t make 2+2 = 4. It’s what the quantities represent (us), and who controls the weights (not us) that matter. It’s politically indefensible to enable extreme ownership over property. They believe it gives them control over agency since only they own the useful machines. On the upside private army ownership is at an all time low and they need us to manage these machines at scale One day of peacefully staying home or even just a serious enough push to make it look like that is happening (remember SOPA blackout and teacher strikes), this goes away and we can work on our own ideas. Probably just get downvoted again for suggesting no way all these people are confused like I think. But sitting on their hands going along erodes their political capital and empowers threats to our own agency at scale. The government should guarantee healthcare and military security to short circuit gamesmanship of private power. We ditched the idea of a king in political contexts, but kept it alive in daily life contexts. Serve your CEO A minority of rich elites are not important enough literally to give them broad ownership of ideas we individually literally imagine up and build.

anon463637 7y ago

"GATTACA II: The Revenge of The Robots" Hello human, please submit blood sample, hair sample and credit history into the data port at one of the kiosks to the front in an orderly fashion. (A sea of people line up and queue to the front.) Number 139 - approved Number 445 - approved All other applicants check back tomorrow for additional opportunity updates. Thank you for applying to Tyrell Corporation. Goodbye.

blakesterz 7y ago

Maybe an even better headline would be "A new obstacle to landing a job: getting approved by AI" Doesn't this same problem exist for anyone finding a job? It's probably even worse when you're looking and your 40 or 50 and even worse if you're changing careers. I'd bet AI drops anyone over the age of 40, almost certainly 50. I'm not saying "these darn kids have it so easy today" I'm sure it's not, but my 1/2 educated guess is that the older you get the harder it gets to make it past these algorithms.

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rayhendricks 7y ago
If they did that would be insta-lawsuit. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
john_moscow 7y ago
Hey, that opens a great business niche for face decoration kits that would add X% to your average interview score. /s

bencollier49 7y ago

Most probably unusable in the UK, as the AI won't be able to explain why it rejected a candidate ("why did you score them low for team working?") and the candidate will take the employer to the cleaners. God only knows what hidden variables it'll start discovering and exploiting. My guess is it'll reinforce well-known prejudices.

mattlondon 7y ago
I think also it is against the Data Protection Act 2018 (? - IANAL): 49 Right not to be subject to automated decision-making ..(1) A controller may not take a significant decision based solely on automated processing unless that decision is required or authorised by law. ..(2) A decision is a “significant decision” for the purpose of this section if, in relation to a data subject, it— ....(a)produces an adverse legal effect concerning the data subject, or ....(b)significantly affects the data subject. I'd say that being rejected automatically for a job before being seen by a human would be a significant decision. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/pdfs/ukpga_20180012_en.pdf https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/pdfs/ukpga_2018...
johnnycab 7y ago
It will be hard to predict what will be considered unusable post-brexit. Although, I don't know how an algorithm will be able to adhere to a mish-mash of job requirements laid down by Dom Cummings for running the government, which involves assorted wierdos juxtaposed with data scientists and Y-Combinator alumni. However, if people like Uri Geller keep applying, it will at least keep the HR bods in gravy.
retrac 7y ago
I'm quite hard of hearing. I wonder what the algorithm's analysis of "facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant's voice" would supposedly reveal about me. Probably something actionable under the nondiscrimination laws here, thankfully.
- bencollier49 7y ago
  "I didn't like the look of him" certainly isn't an acceptable answer, and it's literally the answer in this case, always.

t34543 7y ago

Uh, what kind of companies are using AI to screen candidates?

cocire 7y ago
literally all of them? I guess we can pretend that Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that scrape resumes for keyword matches aren't some specific definition of "AI" if we want to be naive though

code4tee 7y ago

The flip side is that top talent won’t want to put up with the BS so a lot of these companies end up shooting themselves in the foot to save a few bucks on recruiting.

bsenftner 7y ago

Pure fraudulent AI snake oil. Where is a hungry lawyer that wants to team up with computer scientists and take down these predator companies. There is serious wealth to be had by exposing these con men, and a hell of a lot of misery to be halted.

acd 7y ago

In europe it may not be legal to use AI based decision making. According to article 22 of GDPR. "Automated individual decision-making, including profiling" https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

novok 7y ago

This is a modern version of those personality surveys that low rent jobs would give to potential employees.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

This is why I am very skeptical when companies, especially tech companies, go running to Congress wanting more imported labor. They're ignoring qualified applicants left and right due to processes that are optimized to minimize the risk of ever making a bad hire even though it filters out lots of good hires. Fix your process before expecting laws to be changed to ameliorate the negatives of the process you chose.

FpUser 7y ago

I am thinking at what point all those "business innovations" will turn democracy and freedom into a corporate gulag. What's the point of having so called free and democratic government system if you'd be back to USSR 5 days a week from 9 to 5.

john_moscow 7y ago

While I agree that using AI to rank the candidates based on their responses to pre-recorded videos is dystopian, I would like to point out that it only works in the environments where: a) The supply of candidates greatly outweighs demand. b) There is no clear way to assess the individual candidate's impact on the business' ability to make money, and the employees are essentially commoditized. These environments have been known to be toxic for a while: filtering people based on bullshit 20-page personality questionnaires, managers hiring the most desperate ones who would tolerate the most humiliation from them, while every part of the process trying to a wink-wink nudge-nudge to others in order to land their nephew on a cushy position. While AI definitely starts another round in the battle, I would advise anyone who's sick of this bullshit to focus on the economic output of their prospective position. If a company is looking for an AI engineer that can halve the size of their inference model without losing more than 1% of accuracy, they won't waste time scoring your story about your weak sides. They will look at your thesis and hire you if you already did something similar. The problem is that most of the jobs these days are about sitting quiet in a friendly team and smiling when the CEO shows off the team to the next round of potential investors. But those jobs won't give you much growth, and will end your career once you don't look young and cool anymore.

bsenftner 7y ago
"I would like to point out that it only works in the environments where" No, it does not work at all. It is fraud, and needs to be treated as a criminal enterprise.

mentalstate 7y ago

having graduated during the worst recession in 80 years, i am finding sympathy hard to muster

sticky_thrrwwwy 7y ago

I tried to apply for a in-between job at a large outdoor store. They wanted me to use the HireVue software. Unfortunately, there was no way to appeal; the email link they sent was one of those "noreply@contractcompany.com" deals.

djokkataja 7y ago

It doesn't make sense to evaluate someone's abilities to interact with other people based on how they talk to a camera while alone.

trashface 7y ago

It seems like small companies using this will probably fail. They will hire batches of AI-approved, but actually bad candidates. Or they will go long periods without being able to hire for core positions because they "can't find anyone". Both eventually result in the company going out of business. But government or big companies, well, its just bad news there, since they can't fail. They will just get more incompetent.

nitwit005 7y ago

Just seems like a way to lose a lawsuit. All you need is some handicapped client the system can't understand, or a demonstration that it's biased against an accent, and that's all it'll take.

dpflan 7y ago
The customer could blame the service provider - especially when the provider stresses how unbiased they aim to be. But then negligence by the customer is an issue too. I agree with you — bias in ML systems exists and applying it to more facets of life is tricky and snake-oil can be tasty, but this does also surface issues that require standards and assessments of bias.

thewileyone 7y ago

Soon it would just be via a blood test, like Gattaca.

chayesfss 7y ago

I’ve thought for years a SaaS app could be created that elevates a prospects chances of a call. I’d have to hire folks to work alg but we could take their resume and apply to job with a very high score