22 ms·

The computers rejecting job applications

198 points by mnw21cam 6y ago

AntiImperialist 6y ago
If computers can reject your job application, your value in the market probably is not worth much. I would work on that. I am not worried about computers blocking me. Google and Facebook do try to censor my comments with their algorithms. They're pretty easy to get around. I'm more concerned by individuals with political agenda (like for example, here, where I have been shadow-banned by being targeted manually for engaging in "wrongthink": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624084).
underseacables 6y ago
I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the personality tests for them, but with video it’s gotten harder. It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There doesn’t seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn’t do it, the software did it.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors In some European countries like Germany, Spain and Austria it's not even tacit as it's tradition to have your photo and birthday in your resume, especially for more traditional companies, to the point where it generated some scandals in Austria and Germany since in some companies, being black or having Slavic/Turkish/Arabic names got your CV rejected by default even though the CVs would fit the requirements. But it's ok, since they write in the footer of their career page that they don't discriminate on such things. /s Edit: There's even some German satire about the racism job applicants face over having photos in resumes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih5k7g8vUmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih5k7g8vUmE
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    > they don't discriminate on these things. In the U.S. they explicitly do discriminate on these things (and are often required to do so by law), but only in one direction.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      AFAIK, photos and birthday are not allowed in US to prevent such discrimination so how would they do it then?
      - pc86 6y ago
        They're referring to diversity programs as discrimination.
      - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        I am surprised that Germany hasn't been taken to the European court of human rights over this abuse. Maybe those German privacy activists going after google et all might want to look at this.
        ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Because in Germany/Europe discrimination is officially illegal so it is assumed nobody does it, even though people know better, and because you cannot fully outlaw and police tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is evolutionary ingrained in us as a species since the dawn of man. Putting more legislative hoops in place means HR will just need to find more creative ways to formulate job requirements in order to exclude certain classes of people or more creative ways of justifying not taking you application further, but ultimately won't solve the core issue.
        Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Ah the "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" defence. or maybe you ned some high profile sackings of HR directors at a few big German companies ala github.
- nicbou 6y ago
  I interviewed for my first employee a few weeks ago. I just opted for an audio call. I didn't want to judge candidates based on their coronavirus nest, coronavirus haircut, or anything that didn't influence their performance in a strictly remote job. I also didn't want to dress up. That being said, German culture dictates that resumes have pictures, so it's sort of moot.
HenryBemis 6y ago
I assume that not all roles go through this process. If you are hiring for a sensitive position (CEO, other C-suite, any type of Compliance and Internal Audit), the process is different. I will also assume that the "AI" does only the first clean-up. Basically moving them from the 'pile on the floor' to the 'table', pick the 'top 100' for a role. Fun story: When working for a US tech company some years back, we were looking for IT Auditors. Someone saw the word "audit" on an ad and applied. The guy was a "night auditor" (hotels). He didn't bother reading the ad, he just applied. HR didn't review his CV at all, they set up the meeting. We laughed, apologized, got him a coffee, we exchnaged funny/horror stories, and he went his merry way. An AI system would have picked that up in 1ms. A lazy/overwhelmed HR employee did not.
- MikeDelta 6y ago
  Maybe they should use more AI to hire CEOs and upper management from a very large pool. We might get positively surprised. (Or not, in which case I'd be surprised.)
  - mark254 6y ago
    Even just a random process might give better results - sometimes. From THHGTTG: > To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
While there is a natural "that's not fair!" reaction to this, and also I think that a lot of these companies are selling snake oil, I also have to wonder if it can be much worse than the human screening most applicants go through for these kinds of jobs.
- ghaff 6y ago
  A lot of this is probably mostly BS-y stuff like personality tests and so forth. But if there's a stack of 100 resumes applying for some job, there's going to be a lot of arbitrariness in any heuristics used to cull pile down to a reasonable size even once "obviously" unqualified candidates are filtered out (and even that filtering can be a bit arbitrary).
totorovirus 6y ago
I don't think this is bad at all. If there are so many job application that human can't scale enough to process all of them, it should be a big firm with reputation and those companies are spammed by job application from all ranges of candidates. It is just a spam mail detector with job application flavor.
kemiller2002 6y ago
I used to work as a programmer in this field. I'm torn, on one side the "science" behind it is based on statistics and is supposed to be validated. Your view depends largely on whether you trust the validity of psychometrics. On the other side, someone makes a test wraps some statistics around it and says it's valid and measures what it's supposed can seem a little far fetched.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  How can you "validate" it? Are companies making all their staff take these tests and then measuring performance? But the people in your company isn't RCT. Are companies basing this on research that is done on random people? Okay, but skills required on most jobs aren't correlated to some "general" intelligence. How do you deal with the fact that IQ appears to be correlated to income? How you deal with the fact that IQ doesn't correlate to success? Seriously, I don't understand how this makes sense to anyone who has studied stats at all (this is taught to 16 year olds where I am). This stuff is totally out of this world crazy. I am reasonably intelligent, I did an IQ test when I was 12 and it was 130...I am extremely bad at relatively basic elements of life and work. I am good at other things but there is no way this can all be measured or, even, quantified. What is more: the main thing determining my ability is still experience, and my skills change significantly over the course of a few years. This isn't how statistics or science is really supposed to work. Slightly obviously, and contrary to what people think, this entrenches inequality. I understand why companies do this: * Hiring is hard. It is hard to get people who are actually good at hiring, there are no courses for this at university, there are no real rules outside of experience. Ironically, companies get over this by doubling down on their weaknesses. * Underemployment is massive. It used to be hard to apply for a job, everyone just shotguns apps out now, and no-one has a job they want. Employers can do whatever: I am in the UK, even for menial tasks like working in the supermarket, they are doing weird, totally unscientific tests. * Everyone is terrified of hiring. Employment lawyers get richer, laws get more complex, and the risk of being villified in the press for an interview gone bad are massive. Ironically, these totally "objective" processes just solidify inequality. They are designed with context, there is no totally abstract notion of intelligence that is relevant to the work place, they are designed to produce stratification in intelligence that likely does not translate to any real-world scenario. These approaches cause the thing they are trying to prevent because the thing has become so terrifying for companies. Just my 2c, but this stuff is, imo, one of the worst modern corporate behaviour. Whether you think it is right or wrong morally, the outcomes are not good...the solution to bad hiring processes isn't psuedoscience. It is: hiring people who can do their job (again, these are linked, I have noticed that some companies are in the death sprial...they have bad processes that hire bad people, when a company does it well they just exist totally outwith this cycle).
JackFr 6y ago
This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes. He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."
- happyconcepts 6y ago
  Less harm there in the trash than in the cloud to be used by perfect strangers to profile you. "This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  This is such a common story that a lot of people have actually witnessed it. I mean you might as well do that with a stack of CVs, so people actually do it. A friend of mine witnessed this, and clearly the boss hadn't thought of it himself. Variations: "The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones." "The most important thing in sales is selling yourself." Followed by unceremonious dump into bin.
- BerislavLopac 6y ago
  I've read once of a company who fired everyone who had below average performance score.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    "We're the best, because we fire the worst!"
  - srswtf123 6y ago
    I personally worked at a place that stack-ranked all their employees then cut the bottom 1/3 of performers. I was on a team of two, with the other guy a 15-year veteran. Guess who didn’t make it past the first year? Guess who also fixed more outstanding issues in that year than had been fixed in decades? Yep, me, the guy who failed the stack rankings and got fired. I’ve worked dumber places, but really that one was a bit much.
  - 6y ago
MikeDelta 6y ago
I read another post about talent. If you use AI in your process and try to industrialize your hiring to make it as cheap as possible, I think you will be either very, very good at finding and fostering talent... or very, very bad.
throwitaway798 6y ago
I’m not certain you can quantify the qualitative - it’s too much. How would you properly set up what you are looking for concerning the specifics in your company’s culture? It would be great to have follow ups - like did this person who passed all these tests and get hired really turn out to be amazing..? How do they factor Ig they get another job offer and leave shortly after the hire? When humans can’t even read humans how are they going to program something that will?
londons_explore 6y ago
I wonder if it's possible to get the job applicants to evaluate each other? That way you have a process that automatically scales to the number of applicants you have. Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is tricky, but you might imagine some team activity where the team does a task together, and then each person in the team is asked to so some kind of review of the other people in the team. If you make the team activity be a small nugget of the actual work you need done, and you pay all the interviewees generously for their time, I can't imagine interviewees walking away unhappy at the end, even if they don't get the job. You then interview the top 2 people from each team.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is tricky Most companies pay a commission to the recruiter or a referral bonus. You could distribute that to those candidates who contribute to the recommendation of the winning candidate. You're incentivized to recommend the best person, because you can still make money even if you don't get the job. Also you could always hire for a batch of positions, or at least more than one person at a time. That way, just because someone else gets the job doesn't preclude you from also getting it.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  Any time people are asked to review their peers, there's at least some compulsion to rate others poorly because it'll make you look better. IME, the only times that it can go well is with people who don't think the results will matter. And in which case, why do it? The one exception is someone who is already somewhat of a leader and isn't looking for a promotion, and so they don't have much desire to make themselves look better.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  >> I wonder if it's possible to get the job applicants to evaluate each other? I can't tell if this is the stupidest idea or brilliant. On one hand you're saying "take a bunch of people we don't know are qualified to work here and empower them to make our hiring decisions" which sounds dumb. But on the other hand, if people chosen through this process do well, you should go back and hire those who "hired" them as managers :)
acd 6y ago
In Europe Automatic performance reviews are probbly not legal in EU according to GDPR section 22. "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing" https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
- ghaff 6y ago
  >"solely" Which presumably means that they can be used as a filter so long as a human is making the final selection.
motohagiography 6y ago
The value provided by this "AI" solution is that it diffuses accountability for a decision away from any individual making a hiring decision. Would it be ethical if it were used to operate a food rationing system, or maybe a vaccine rationing system, and at what point does the level of plenty make it acceptable? I could convolve or convolute any scheme to make the attribute I was selecting for seem "random" and then refuse to acknowledge the views of anyone who couldn't explain gradient descent as well. There may be a general principle here where if you are mediated by machines, you cease to be a person and just represent a sample in a set of samples, and hiring processes like this indicate an economically inferior-good kind of employer that people select away from as soon as they can afford to.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  What responsibility is there to diffuse? There is no obligation to form a relationship. Internal ass-covering maybe? But really that would just shift to whomever decided upon the AI system - if they had a system that just rolled a die and picked a resume by index their bosses would not be pleased. While there is cliche angst about being mediated by machines that has existed since bueracracies - but the parts were humans. Sadly the bueracracies qualify as an improvement over literal fiefdoms.
rammy1234 6y ago
are resumes valid anymore ?
- samastur 6y ago
  Yes, just not everywhere. We use them to filter our candidates.
trynton 6y ago
It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are more likely to be hired on, if your parents are friends with the owner of the company. As for a video interview, I would totally clam-up. If you do want your application to make it to the top of the pile, then what you do is this. Fill the page with white-on-white very tiny words that are designed to hit the AI buzz word detector. You can extract these from the company "Mission Statement" :s https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-09-01 https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-09-01
dcolkitt 6y ago
The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against the hiring AI. You'd have the system generate your resume and application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on. In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly explain why their resume is a recipe for carne asada, an excerpt from Moby Dick, and a bunch of windings. But supposedly it's predicted to increase final offer salary by 13.54%, so nobody questions it. Anybody who still writes out their resume by hand is considered a luddite weirdo, and definitely not someone you'd want to have join your company.
- dunefox 6y ago
  Or just send in an image of a koala with a noise filter over it. 99% confidence for a prime candidate.
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago
  Lol.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Yeap. There then ought to be a whole cottage industry of gaming AI applications and AI hiring. So, we're basically voluntarily letting the machines take over and replace human jobs, nuance, and critical thinking? Oh and then the next logical progressions are AI performance reviews and AI management. Within a decade, your AI boss will slinging around a coffee cup and saying "yeah, I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday too." You are a true believer, blessings of the State, blessings of the masses. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy.
  - beckingz 6y ago
    There are numerous resume consultants who specialize in getting past HR screens and keyword filters.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
hertzrat 6y ago
The obvious connection that we’ll see in the news soon is how companies will combine this with all the digital tracking and profiling being done. Every message somebody sends to a teammate in an online game or discord conversation will be a factor in a job application result 5-10 years later
OliverGilan 6y ago
About a year and half ago I was applying for a software engineering internship at Goldman Sachs and they made me take a Pymetrics test. One of the tasks was to press the spacebar as many times as possible in 30 seconds. I didn't do the task and withdrew my application.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Cordless drill with a small paddle bit held the right distance from the space bar would have aced that test. Of course there's software tricks you could have used as well.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    Or a software input device
    - site-packages1 6y ago
      Or, presumably, holding the spacebar down and letting the repeat function do its thing
    - bregma 6y ago
      `yes | tr 'y\n' ' ' >/dev/input`
- glitchc 6y ago
  Sounds like 50% of video games in the market. Just pretend it's about how high you can jump with infinite jump enabled!
- curiousllama 6y ago
  To be fair, I've been training for that task my entire life
- bogwog 6y ago
  That sounds like it could be discriminatory against people with certain disabilities. Besides the fact that it's stupid and somewhat embarassing.
curiousllama 6y ago
I was part of a very in-depth evaluations of both Pymetrics & HireVue for a large company recently (2 different evals, among others). Some interesting things we observed: (1) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether either tool did anything more useful than filter out people who don't want to take the test / don't trust "AI". (2) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether (1) was a useful, arbitrary, or counterproductive selection criterion for the roles we were hiring for. (3) It was very clear to us, with a high degree of certainty, that both impressed a LOT of the higher ups (4) It seemed somewhat clear that both were unlikely to get us sued (note: this is a high bar). However, HireVue (as of a year ago) could not in ANY meaningful way substantiate this claim "AI is more impartial than a human interviewer, as it has no bias," and it angers me that they make that claim. After conducting a bunch of reviews like this (including other tools), I concluded that most AI recruiting software is a combo of (a) very useful process automation and (b) hocus-pocus, magicical, pseudo-AI. I had people telling me they used supervised learning because they had a team of supervisors in India. I had people telling me they had "Custom AI" when they were just calling some random unverified third party API. And I OFTEN heard nonsense, unverified claims of "unbiased" AI, as if eg training a hiring model using geographical factors won't tell you "don't hire non-college-age people from the south side of Chicago". If anyone is looking to use recruiting AI, get a good IO psych person and listen to them.
- finolex1 6y ago
  The pymetrics test mentioned in the article involves among other things, clicking on a balloon till it pops and pressing the keyboard as many times as possible in a minute. As much as people love to hate on leetcode-style interview programming questions, they are at least remotely related to performance on the job. Personally, I've found it to be a good filter in terms of deciding where to interview at. Companies that have adopted these pop-psychology tests (management consulting companies and big banks like BCG, JP Morgan) signal that they've let non-technical upper management hold sway over recruiting in comparison to tech-centric companies/hedge funds etc. that seem to have more rigorous recruiting standards.
  - mattgreenrocks 6y ago
lyptt 6y ago
There's no way in hell I'd do an AI-based interview. It speaks a lot about the way a company treats its employees if they can't even be bothered to speak to you until the second round.
jakub_g 6y ago
FWIW (at least in tech industry), apparently the automated filtering systems are a myth spread by companies who make money on the promise to optimize your resume to get past the filter. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1292909844886945792 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1292909844886945792 (The OP of the tweet was an engineering manager in several big tech companies, wrote The Software Engineer’s Guidebook last year, and talked with many recruiters in the process)
- asdf123qwer 6y ago
  >(at least in tech industry), apparently the automated filtering systems are a myth Sounds like horseshit. There's no shortage of graduates in tech, on top of graduates of various "bootcamps", as everyone and their dog has been telling young people they just need to "learn to code!" and they'll have a luxurious, joyous future.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  I don't know if there are automated filtering systems that will send a rejection email in place but I know as a manager who used LinkedIn job posts I had what was basically a, "qualified" and then a "not qualified/spam" folder for applications. New applications were auto sorted into one or the other depending on their resume/linkedin profile/some other factors I was not aware of. I could still find those profiles but it was auto filtering the candidates it thought were relevant and those that were not. To at least some extend these types of automated filtering systems do exists. I don't know why recruiters/manager say they do not.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  Huh? This directly disagrees with my experience. I believe this person is mistaken. Resumes are always filtered before they hit my desk, I just never even knew the filter happened. Apparently they toss out a huge amount. Reading this tweet in depth disagrees with a lot of my experience in Fortune 500 tech companies. Can’t figure out the misunderstanding.
  - zippergz 6y ago
firefoxd 6y ago
This reminds me of some times in the mid 2000s, I was looking for a job. I had a friend who was a manager at EA. He was trying to get me a job as a game tester but no luck. I had to apply online through their system, but they couldn't find my application. After days of applying and not appearing, someone told him that it's possible that my application was being rejected. They found my name in the rejected pile. I don't know what exactly in my application was turning me into a red flag, or of if he didn't really want to hire me, but unless the system accepted me, I was not going to get hired. I was never hired.
crispyambulance 6y ago
Doing an online application to initiate contact with a potential employer is already a strike against the applicant. The whole point of these systems is to whittle down the pool of candidates down to single digits. Of course each candidate is going to "perfectly match" the stated faux-objective criteria because that's what the users of these systems think they want. Whether or not that's what they need is another question entirely. For the jobs where it's possible, it's much better to reach out directly to human beings and exercise one's human professional network. The best jobs are filled by referral and/or reputation, almost always.
- ghaff 6y ago
  That's been my experience but it probably does legitimately depend. I think there are some people whose skills match sought after keywords and they're fine with those positions. If you've got a more eclectic (and often more senior with varied types of experience), keywords probably don't help much at all.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    I don't bother with online applications anymore - I don't think I've ever had a single experience where doing so didn't result in an automated rejection letter or simply no response. Seems like a total waste of time. Applying via human connections (whether it be a friend, coworker, or even a recruiter - first or third party) has been tremendously more successful.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  Google did a study on what elements of the hiring process correlated with good performance and found that references we're almost useless.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    Google is Google. They hire _VAST_ numbers of people straight out of college. It's practically a pipeline for them. I am not saying that neglecting referrals from professional contacts doesn't work for Google, but rather that it's commonplace and "good enough" for other places. Moreover, from the point of view of an individual rather than the employer's performance metrics, it's generally better to make a human connection if you're just talking about the chances of getting hired.
deleted 6y ago
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toyg 6y ago
Disappointing that a BBC piece does not cover any UK-based business in this sector, like Arctic Shores (https://www.arcticshores.com/ https://www.arcticshores.com/). The journalist lives in NYC but these days that shouldn't really matter...
sfg 6y ago
"AI can help evaluate all those candidates in a very consistent way," he says." Which, if applied across an industry, means someone will be consistently rejected; where as now they might have a chance of finding a position somewhere, as the intellects in each hiring process are different.
swalsh 6y ago
10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations, already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to treating people as "resources", completely dropping the word "human". We all need to think about the future we're building here.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Sounds a bit Black Mirror Complex. People were complaining about being treated as resources since the industrial revolution - and before then serfs knew that they were resources! More power than governments, seriously? The only time I have seen that rhetoric come up is complete fucking morons complaining about encryption and wanting to outlaw math.
  - jcims 6y ago
    Help help! I’m being repressed! https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw
- joshuahughes 6y ago
  I wish it wasn't true, but the path we're headed down is pretty much set now. I can't help feeling that the habit of removing identifying markers (names, ages, etc) from resumes to try to ensure equality in hiring is also part of the same ill-fated direction. I dearly wish that the world I was leaving my kids wasn't so dehumanised.
  - swalsh 6y ago
    It goes beyond resumes. Our criminal justice system also uses AI to make judgement decisions. I understand the need to eliminate bias from systems (though I question how much bias is actually being eliminated via these systems) but the need to humanize people when they are most vulnerable is important.
  - 6y ago
JustARandomGuy 6y ago
Related story: I applied for a position with United Airlines a few months ago. I started the job application, then stopped in the middle for whatever reason. United’s job system emailed me at 9 PM a reminder to continue my application, and I completed it less than a half hour later. A half hour after that (just after 10 PM) United emailed me a rejection notice. So either some United recruiter was working late (I’m in the same time zone as United’s HQ) or my resume was completely rejected by a bot. It’s pretty annoying to put in all that work and get a rejection so quickly.
- heelix 6y ago
  Very early in my career, I did an open house where I chatted with their principal architect and got hired. A few weeks later, after I had been working for a week, I received a letter from HR rejecting me. I wandered over to the HR office and meekly asked if I was still employed - and thankfully was. Apparently they had just gotten to screening the resumes that were handed in at the open house.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  Don't know if this is the case with United but I experienced a few companies where the first round of recruiting defense was in India - so it's possible someone got your app in the middle of their workday.
- gifnamething 6y ago
  And now you're presumably much less likely to try applying again, regardless of how well you fit future openings. They burnt the bridge. The equivalent for you would be turning down a job offer with 4-letter words. In many areas there aren't enough skilled candidates for this to be sustainable.
cullinap 6y ago
This reminds me of the nfl combine but for jobs. There are plenty of examples of players that do well in the combine but fail in the nfl. Your test just selects for individuals who are good at testing and not necessarily good at their potential job.
aboringusername 6y ago
Computers decide if you get a job (and access to a resource called "money", pretty important for living). Computers decide if your Google accounts gets deleted, without warning. Computers decide if you can get credit, or open a bank, or participate in society. And there is 0, yup, 0 accountability. Computer doesn't like you? Tough shit, get fucked, nothing you can do. If you don't have an internet connection, you're fucked. If you don't have fast upload speeds and a capability to record video and are willing to store it on someone else's computer (where they will datamine it and use it against you in the future, or it'll be "leaked"/sold) then you're fucked. So now, to get a job I need: To participate in surveillance and trading of my data where it'll be data raped A smart phone A fast internet connection So great, fuck you to all the poor people I guess who find technology hard, they can just go die. I'm beginning to think computers were the biggest mistake humans ever made. We need regulation and fast against this sort of thing, to make the hiring process fair and accessible to everyone.
- encom 6y ago
  This is maybe true in Silicon Valley. Not in the real world. Also, nobody needs a Google account.
  - mafuy 6y ago
    I wish it were as you say. Effectively, at least a facebook account was needed at two of the universities I was at. I've also seen instances of important (even life threatening) information being transmitted via social networks, exclusively. So yes, sometimes you pretty much have to be part of that game.
- d1zzy 6y ago
  Computers are just a tool, they're great at processing lots of data very fast. That makes certain types of tasks a good fit for them. None of the things you mentioned were necessarily better before computers, they simply used other methods to do the selection. But that doesn't mean those methods were better. > I'm beginning to think computers were the biggest mistake humans ever made. We need regulation and fast against this sort of thing, to make the hiring process fair and accessible to everyone. It was never fair and accessible to everyone (for those companies that would employ algorithm based resume screening). Just that instead of whatever other arbitrary mechanism they had used until now to filter out candidates they now use "AI". It's good to be trying to find better solutions to these problems, but don't rile up against computers because computers might be part of the solution.
SharpeDidntFoul 6y ago
You can pay about $250 for someone to optimize your resume with certain key words, punctuation, and formatting choices to make it through these systems. I did this and it worked. I was going for entry level finance roles in tech and finance. I went to a top 40 finance program, interned at Morgan Stanley, a hedge fund, and a respectable incubator, but had a hard time getting replies to my job applications. I used all the help and resources from my university's career center and followed everything on the infamous "Mergers and Inquisitions" website, which is supposed to be the holy grail of career guidance and resume formatting for finance majors. I had my resume looked at my everyone I could get critiques and edits from. I wasn't getting answers from my applications. After hiring someone to change the formatting, I got automated replies saying that they liked my resume and would reach out to schedule a phone screening. Same person, same level of "professionalism" on the resume, same experience, just different key words and seemingly arbitrary formatting choices to please the AI overlords. I found 5 people claiming to optimize resumes for algorithms for the sorts of jobs I wanted. They all had high reviews from customers. I then asked them all questions through email and phone calls to see if they actually knew what they were talking about. I picked the one who appeared the best. Not only did she have some personal proximity to the space, but she seemed to know all of the nuances of how to please the resume algos. It was the best $250 I ever spent. Point is, people are cracking these processes, it feels arbitrary but that's how the game works now if your a job seeker. Whether if be something like a resume screener or something of this level that claims to be able to understand your personality in 25 minutes, you can crack the system. If your hiring, I can't imagine how confusing this whole mess is on top of your already busy work day, but it's easy to manipulate these screening software products to make them think whatever you want. I've met many sketchy software sales people who just schlep useless enterprise products at businesses. I wonder how much of the enterprise SaaS world is made up of this sort of thing.
- fiestaman 6y ago
  I'm applying to stuff right now, mind emailing me this person's information?
  - meremortals 6y ago
libtorte 6y ago
I find the concept of not being allowed to hire (or not hire) whoever you want horrifying. My life goal is to get my kids to a level where they can afford to refuse to take demeaning tests. But if companies want do employ them, they should be allowed to do so.
zaptheimpaler 6y ago
Yeah it sucks computers do this but its important to remember people can be equally cruel. Big tech companies who need talent arbitrarily accept/reject candidates based on resume buzzwords and whether they can leetcode. But the long tail of small companies, often run by idiots or frat bros of some kind will reject you for reasons stupider still - dont like hair, not hot enough, can only drink 2 beers?, only knows Java LMAO. In other industries, psychometrics are common and even effective. I remember one dull self help author talking about how insurance companies screen for optimism because lol you're gonna need it to consistently make 100 calls a day, knowing only 5 people will buy. Meaning forget merit, EVEN IF you make it past the randomness filter, your interview & job performance is determined based on largely immoveable parts of your personality. Don't forget, the corporate world outside of the rarefied space of tech is an absolute shit show. Whenever i feel like ranting against how shitty AI is, remember folks, i remember the majority of humans suck too. It gives me a warm, cozy feeling like I'm a turkey the day before thanksgiving.
valentinemsmith 6y ago
This reminds me of when I was working for an EdTech startup nearly a decade ago where the CEO invented his own “Mini Myers Briggs” test, and we developed a “feature” to reject any teachers applying who came back INTJ after filling out that stupid test. The CEO adamantly believed INTJs didn’t make good teachers.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
> "Everyone wants the right job, and to hire the right person. It doesn't benefit anyone for the match to be off. Trying to use these AI systems in smart ways is to everyone's advantage." I mean, that's flagrantly untrue. There are plenty of, I hesitate to use the term "bad actors", but people who will lie and embellish their resume, tailor their answers to these personality quizzes in an optimal way, and otherwise game the system to maximize their payoff - which is to get hired.
microtherion 6y ago
Yes, those AI systems surely create garbage results right now, and worse, once they are trained perfectly, they will provide perfect cover to codify existing hiring biases: 1. Take existing employee base, hired through biased process. 2. Use resumes to train multi-million parameter machine learning model. 3. System will replicate biases, while the process is completely opaque to review by even the people who created it. But then again, existing hiring practices are just as bad, e.g. hiring European engineers only if they graduated from Oxford, Cambridge, or the University of Bucharest: https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864 https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864 Or the still widespread practice in Switzerland to demand hand written job applications for executive positions, in order to have the applications evaluated by graphologists…
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  This has to be a prank somehow. The list of North American universities makes no sense. Some co-op technical college I never heard of listed along Stanford/MIT.
totetsu 6y ago
When I took one one of these things for a temping company a few years back, and it was asking me about basic Excel things, I took a look at the network traffic in the browser. I could see it was just like "question 2, pass yes, respons time 10s" in JSON. So I feed it through portswigger burp proxy and modified the responses as they went. I still think I was demonstrating basic IT skills.
learc83 6y ago
I’ve worked in the HR tech space and we integrated with all of the big applicant tracking systems. Many of them have screening questions. So you can ask something like “can you lift 50 lbs?” And set it up so answering no will screen the candidate out. But even in that case recruiters and hiring managers will usually still look at the candidate anyway. There are also 3rd party addons that will score candidates, and resume parsers that will let recruiters search resumes for keywords. But as far as I know there are no widely used AI solutions that will actually flat out reject candidates with no human intervention. Even if it worked, the risk is too great that your model will start over rejecting people from protected classes and no one will notice until you’re hit with a lawsuit.
- indymike 6y ago
  Most of the AI I've seen is really just a database query dressed up with a HAL-9000 eyeball camera or something. A good example is a license expiration date. It says it expired four years ago. problem is that candidate data is largely parsed from randomly formatted resume files, so it's not that accurate and as a result, the date from the college graduation ended up in the license field.
oksurewhynot 6y ago
From Pymetrics' CEO's Linkedin: Avid technophile who believes audited AI can act like CRISPR: retaining all the wisdom of humans while stripping out ineradicable bias. lol wut

198 points by mnw21cam 6y ago

If computers can reject your job application, your value in the market probably is not worth much. I would work on that. I am not worried about computers blocking me. Google and Facebook do try to censor my comments with their algorithms. They're pretty easy to get around. I'm more concerned by individuals with political agenda (like for example, here, where I have been shadow-banned by being targeted manually for engaging in "wrongthink": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25624084).

underseacables 6y ago

I know a number of people who have paid for someone to do the personality tests for them, but with video it’s gotten harder. It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors. There doesn’t seem to be any safe guards for it; we didn’t do it, the software did it.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>It’s also gotten easier for companies to reject for tacit bias such as gender, race, and any other number of factors In some European countries like Germany, Spain and Austria it's not even tacit as it's tradition to have your photo and birthday in your resume, especially for more traditional companies, to the point where it generated some scandals in Austria and Germany since in some companies, being black or having Slavic/Turkish/Arabic names got your CV rejected by default even though the CVs would fit the requirements. But it's ok, since they write in the footer of their career page that they don't discriminate on such things. /s Edit: There's even some German satire about the racism job applicants face over having photos in resumes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih5k7g8vUmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih5k7g8vUmE
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > they don't discriminate on these things. In the U.S. they explicitly do discriminate on these things (and are often required to do so by law), but only in one direction.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    AFAIK, photos and birthday are not allowed in US to prevent such discrimination so how would they do it then?
    - pc86 6y ago
      They're referring to diversity programs as discrimination.
    - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
      I am surprised that Germany hasn't been taken to the European court of human rights over this abuse. Maybe those German privacy activists going after google et all might want to look at this.
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Because in Germany/Europe discrimination is officially illegal so it is assumed nobody does it, even though people know better, and because you cannot fully outlaw and police tribalism, human bias and cronyism that is evolutionary ingrained in us as a species since the dawn of man. Putting more legislative hoops in place means HR will just need to find more creative ways to formulate job requirements in order to exclude certain classes of people or more creative ways of justifying not taking you application further, but ultimately won't solve the core issue.
        Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        Ah the "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" defence. or maybe you ned some high profile sackings of HR directors at a few big German companies ala github.
nicbou 6y ago
I interviewed for my first employee a few weeks ago. I just opted for an audio call. I didn't want to judge candidates based on their coronavirus nest, coronavirus haircut, or anything that didn't influence their performance in a strictly remote job. I also didn't want to dress up. That being said, German culture dictates that resumes have pictures, so it's sort of moot.

HenryBemis 6y ago

I assume that not all roles go through this process. If you are hiring for a sensitive position (CEO, other C-suite, any type of Compliance and Internal Audit), the process is different. I will also assume that the "AI" does only the first clean-up. Basically moving them from the 'pile on the floor' to the 'table', pick the 'top 100' for a role. Fun story: When working for a US tech company some years back, we were looking for IT Auditors. Someone saw the word "audit" on an ad and applied. The guy was a "night auditor" (hotels). He didn't bother reading the ad, he just applied. HR didn't review his CV at all, they set up the meeting. We laughed, apologized, got him a coffee, we exchnaged funny/horror stories, and he went his merry way. An AI system would have picked that up in 1ms. A lazy/overwhelmed HR employee did not.

MikeDelta 6y ago
Maybe they should use more AI to hire CEOs and upper management from a very large pool. We might get positively surprised. (Or not, in which case I'd be surprised.)
- mark254 6y ago
  Even just a random process might give better results - sometimes. From THHGTTG: > To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

While there is a natural "that's not fair!" reaction to this, and also I think that a lot of these companies are selling snake oil, I also have to wonder if it can be much worse than the human screening most applicants go through for these kinds of jobs.

ghaff 6y ago
A lot of this is probably mostly BS-y stuff like personality tests and so forth. But if there's a stack of 100 resumes applying for some job, there's going to be a lot of arbitrariness in any heuristics used to cull pile down to a reasonable size even once "obviously" unqualified candidates are filtered out (and even that filtering can be a bit arbitrary).

totorovirus 6y ago

I don't think this is bad at all. If there are so many job application that human can't scale enough to process all of them, it should be a big firm with reputation and those companies are spammed by job application from all ranges of candidates. It is just a spam mail detector with job application flavor.

kemiller2002 6y ago

I used to work as a programmer in this field. I'm torn, on one side the "science" behind it is based on statistics and is supposed to be validated. Your view depends largely on whether you trust the validity of psychometrics. On the other side, someone makes a test wraps some statistics around it and says it's valid and measures what it's supposed can seem a little far fetched.

hogFeast 6y ago
How can you "validate" it? Are companies making all their staff take these tests and then measuring performance? But the people in your company isn't RCT. Are companies basing this on research that is done on random people? Okay, but skills required on most jobs aren't correlated to some "general" intelligence. How do you deal with the fact that IQ appears to be correlated to income? How you deal with the fact that IQ doesn't correlate to success? Seriously, I don't understand how this makes sense to anyone who has studied stats at all (this is taught to 16 year olds where I am). This stuff is totally out of this world crazy. I am reasonably intelligent, I did an IQ test when I was 12 and it was 130...I am extremely bad at relatively basic elements of life and work. I am good at other things but there is no way this can all be measured or, even, quantified. What is more: the main thing determining my ability is still experience, and my skills change significantly over the course of a few years. This isn't how statistics or science is really supposed to work. Slightly obviously, and contrary to what people think, this entrenches inequality. I understand why companies do this: * Hiring is hard. It is hard to get people who are actually good at hiring, there are no courses for this at university, there are no real rules outside of experience. Ironically, companies get over this by doubling down on their weaknesses. * Underemployment is massive. It used to be hard to apply for a job, everyone just shotguns apps out now, and no-one has a job they want. Employers can do whatever: I am in the UK, even for menial tasks like working in the supermarket, they are doing weird, totally unscientific tests. * Everyone is terrified of hiring. Employment lawyers get richer, laws get more complex, and the risk of being villified in the press for an interview gone bad are massive. Ironically, these totally "objective" processes just solidify inequality. They are designed with context, there is no totally abstract notion of intelligence that is relevant to the work place, they are designed to produce stratification in intelligence that likely does not translate to any real-world scenario. These approaches cause the thing they are trying to prevent because the thing has become so terrifying for companies. Just my 2c, but this stuff is, imo, one of the worst modern corporate behaviour. Whether you think it is right or wrong morally, the outcomes are not good...the solution to bad hiring processes isn't psuedoscience. It is: hiring people who can do their job (again, these are linked, I have noticed that some companies are in the death sprial...they have bad processes that hire bad people, when a company does it well they just exist totally outwith this cycle).

JackFr 6y ago

This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes. He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."

happyconcepts 6y ago
Less harm there in the trash than in the cloud to be used by perfect strangers to profile you. "This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.
lordnacho 6y ago
This is such a common story that a lot of people have actually witnessed it. I mean you might as well do that with a stack of CVs, so people actually do it. A friend of mine witnessed this, and clearly the boss hadn't thought of it himself. Variations: "The way we hire traders is we don't hire unlucky ones." "The most important thing in sales is selling yourself." Followed by unceremonious dump into bin.
BerislavLopac 6y ago
I've read once of a company who fired everyone who had below average performance score.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  "We're the best, because we fire the worst!"
- srswtf123 6y ago
  I personally worked at a place that stack-ranked all their employees then cut the bottom 1/3 of performers. I was on a team of two, with the other guy a 15-year veteran. Guess who didn’t make it past the first year? Guess who also fixed more outstanding issues in that year than had been fixed in decades? Yep, me, the guy who failed the stack rankings and got fired. I’ve worked dumber places, but really that one was a bit much.
- 6y ago

MikeDelta 6y ago

I read another post about talent. If you use AI in your process and try to industrialize your hiring to make it as cheap as possible, I think you will be either very, very good at finding and fostering talent... or very, very bad.

throwitaway798 6y ago

I’m not certain you can quantify the qualitative - it’s too much. How would you properly set up what you are looking for concerning the specifics in your company’s culture? It would be great to have follow ups - like did this person who passed all these tests and get hired really turn out to be amazing..? How do they factor Ig they get another job offer and leave shortly after the hire? When humans can’t even read humans how are they going to program something that will?

londons_explore 6y ago

I wonder if it's possible to get the job applicants to evaluate each other? That way you have a process that automatically scales to the number of applicants you have. Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is tricky, but you might imagine some team activity where the team does a task together, and then each person in the team is asked to so some kind of review of the other people in the team. If you make the team activity be a small nugget of the actual work you need done, and you pay all the interviewees generously for their time, I can't imagine interviewees walking away unhappy at the end, even if they don't get the job. You then interview the top 2 people from each team.

dcolkitt 6y ago
> Exactly how to structure it so it can't be gamed/subverted is tricky Most companies pay a commission to the recruiter or a referral bonus. You could distribute that to those candidates who contribute to the recommendation of the winning candidate. You're incentivized to recommend the best person, because you can still make money even if you don't get the job. Also you could always hire for a batch of positions, or at least more than one person at a time. That way, just because someone else gets the job doesn't preclude you from also getting it.
wccrawford 6y ago
Any time people are asked to review their peers, there's at least some compulsion to rate others poorly because it'll make you look better. IME, the only times that it can go well is with people who don't think the results will matter. And in which case, why do it? The one exception is someone who is already somewhat of a leader and isn't looking for a promotion, and so they don't have much desire to make themselves look better.
xyzelement 6y ago
>> I wonder if it's possible to get the job applicants to evaluate each other? I can't tell if this is the stupidest idea or brilliant. On one hand you're saying "take a bunch of people we don't know are qualified to work here and empower them to make our hiring decisions" which sounds dumb. But on the other hand, if people chosen through this process do well, you should go back and hire those who "hired" them as managers :)

acd 6y ago

In Europe Automatic performance reviews are probbly not legal in EU according to GDPR section 22. "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing" https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

ghaff 6y ago
>"solely" Which presumably means that they can be used as a filter so long as a human is making the final selection.

motohagiography 6y ago

The value provided by this "AI" solution is that it diffuses accountability for a decision away from any individual making a hiring decision. Would it be ethical if it were used to operate a food rationing system, or maybe a vaccine rationing system, and at what point does the level of plenty make it acceptable? I could convolve or convolute any scheme to make the attribute I was selecting for seem "random" and then refuse to acknowledge the views of anyone who couldn't explain gradient descent as well. There may be a general principle here where if you are mediated by machines, you cease to be a person and just represent a sample in a set of samples, and hiring processes like this indicate an economically inferior-good kind of employer that people select away from as soon as they can afford to.

Nasrudith 6y ago
What responsibility is there to diffuse? There is no obligation to form a relationship. Internal ass-covering maybe? But really that would just shift to whomever decided upon the AI system - if they had a system that just rolled a die and picked a resume by index their bosses would not be pleased. While there is cliche angst about being mediated by machines that has existed since bueracracies - but the parts were humans. Sadly the bueracracies qualify as an improvement over literal fiefdoms.

rammy1234 6y ago

are resumes valid anymore ?

samastur 6y ago
Yes, just not everywhere. We use them to filter our candidates.

trynton 6y ago

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are more likely to be hired on, if your parents are friends with the owner of the company. As for a video interview, I would totally clam-up. If you do want your application to make it to the top of the pile, then what you do is this. Fill the page with white-on-white very tiny words that are designed to hit the AI buzz word detector. You can extract these from the company "Mission Statement" :s https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-09-01 https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-09-01

dcolkitt 6y ago

The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against the hiring AI. You'd have the system generate your resume and application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on. In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly explain why their resume is a recipe for carne asada, an excerpt from Moby Dick, and a bunch of windings. But supposedly it's predicted to increase final offer salary by 13.54%, so nobody questions it. Anybody who still writes out their resume by hand is considered a luddite weirdo, and definitely not someone you'd want to have join your company.

dunefox 6y ago
Or just send in an image of a koala with a noise filter over it. 99% confidence for a prime candidate.
dennis_jeeves 6y ago
Lol.
airhead969 6y ago
Yeap. There then ought to be a whole cottage industry of gaming AI applications and AI hiring. So, we're basically voluntarily letting the machines take over and replace human jobs, nuance, and critical thinking? Oh and then the next logical progressions are AI performance reviews and AI management. Within a decade, your AI boss will slinging around a coffee cup and saying "yeah, I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday too." You are a true believer, blessings of the State, blessings of the masses. Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy.
- beckingz 6y ago
  There are numerous resume consultants who specialize in getting past HR screens and keyword filters.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago

hertzrat 6y ago

The obvious connection that we’ll see in the news soon is how companies will combine this with all the digital tracking and profiling being done. Every message somebody sends to a teammate in an online game or discord conversation will be a factor in a job application result 5-10 years later

OliverGilan 6y ago

About a year and half ago I was applying for a software engineering internship at Goldman Sachs and they made me take a Pymetrics test. One of the tasks was to press the spacebar as many times as possible in 30 seconds. I didn't do the task and withdrew my application.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Cordless drill with a small paddle bit held the right distance from the space bar would have aced that test. Of course there's software tricks you could have used as well.
- nicbou 6y ago
  Or a software input device
  - site-packages1 6y ago
    Or, presumably, holding the spacebar down and letting the repeat function do its thing
  - bregma 6y ago
    `yes | tr 'y\n' ' ' >/dev/input`
glitchc 6y ago
Sounds like 50% of video games in the market. Just pretend it's about how high you can jump with infinite jump enabled!
curiousllama 6y ago
To be fair, I've been training for that task my entire life
bogwog 6y ago
That sounds like it could be discriminatory against people with certain disabilities. Besides the fact that it's stupid and somewhat embarassing.

curiousllama 6y ago

I was part of a very in-depth evaluations of both Pymetrics & HireVue for a large company recently (2 different evals, among others). Some interesting things we observed: (1) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether either tool did anything more useful than filter out people who don't want to take the test / don't trust "AI". (2) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether (1) was a useful, arbitrary, or counterproductive selection criterion for the roles we were hiring for. (3) It was very clear to us, with a high degree of certainty, that both impressed a LOT of the higher ups (4) It seemed somewhat clear that both were unlikely to get us sued (note: this is a high bar). However, HireVue (as of a year ago) could not in ANY meaningful way substantiate this claim "AI is more impartial than a human interviewer, as it has no bias," and it angers me that they make that claim. After conducting a bunch of reviews like this (including other tools), I concluded that most AI recruiting software is a combo of (a) very useful process automation and (b) hocus-pocus, magicical, pseudo-AI. I had people telling me they used supervised learning because they had a team of supervisors in India. I had people telling me they had "Custom AI" when they were just calling some random unverified third party API. And I OFTEN heard nonsense, unverified claims of "unbiased" AI, as if eg training a hiring model using geographical factors won't tell you "don't hire non-college-age people from the south side of Chicago". If anyone is looking to use recruiting AI, get a good IO psych person and listen to them.

finolex1 6y ago
The pymetrics test mentioned in the article involves among other things, clicking on a balloon till it pops and pressing the keyboard as many times as possible in a minute. As much as people love to hate on leetcode-style interview programming questions, they are at least remotely related to performance on the job. Personally, I've found it to be a good filter in terms of deciding where to interview at. Companies that have adopted these pop-psychology tests (management consulting companies and big banks like BCG, JP Morgan) signal that they've let non-technical upper management hold sway over recruiting in comparison to tech-centric companies/hedge funds etc. that seem to have more rigorous recruiting standards.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago

lyptt 6y ago

There's no way in hell I'd do an AI-based interview. It speaks a lot about the way a company treats its employees if they can't even be bothered to speak to you until the second round.

jakub_g 6y ago

FWIW (at least in tech industry), apparently the automated filtering systems are a myth spread by companies who make money on the promise to optimize your resume to get past the filter. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1292909844886945792 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1292909844886945792 (The OP of the tweet was an engineering manager in several big tech companies, wrote The Software Engineer’s Guidebook last year, and talked with many recruiters in the process)

asdf123qwer 6y ago
>(at least in tech industry), apparently the automated filtering systems are a myth Sounds like horseshit. There's no shortage of graduates in tech, on top of graduates of various "bootcamps", as everyone and their dog has been telling young people they just need to "learn to code!" and they'll have a luxurious, joyous future.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
I don't know if there are automated filtering systems that will send a rejection email in place but I know as a manager who used LinkedIn job posts I had what was basically a, "qualified" and then a "not qualified/spam" folder for applications. New applications were auto sorted into one or the other depending on their resume/linkedin profile/some other factors I was not aware of. I could still find those profiles but it was auto filtering the candidates it thought were relevant and those that were not. To at least some extend these types of automated filtering systems do exists. I don't know why recruiters/manager say they do not.
aspaceman 6y ago
Huh? This directly disagrees with my experience. I believe this person is mistaken. Resumes are always filtered before they hit my desk, I just never even knew the filter happened. Apparently they toss out a huge amount. Reading this tweet in depth disagrees with a lot of my experience in Fortune 500 tech companies. Can’t figure out the misunderstanding.
- zippergz 6y ago

firefoxd 6y ago

This reminds me of some times in the mid 2000s, I was looking for a job. I had a friend who was a manager at EA. He was trying to get me a job as a game tester but no luck. I had to apply online through their system, but they couldn't find my application. After days of applying and not appearing, someone told him that it's possible that my application was being rejected. They found my name in the rejected pile. I don't know what exactly in my application was turning me into a red flag, or of if he didn't really want to hire me, but unless the system accepted me, I was not going to get hired. I was never hired.

crispyambulance 6y ago

Doing an online application to initiate contact with a potential employer is already a strike against the applicant. The whole point of these systems is to whittle down the pool of candidates down to single digits. Of course each candidate is going to "perfectly match" the stated faux-objective criteria because that's what the users of these systems think they want. Whether or not that's what they need is another question entirely. For the jobs where it's possible, it's much better to reach out directly to human beings and exercise one's human professional network. The best jobs are filled by referral and/or reputation, almost always.

ghaff 6y ago
That's been my experience but it probably does legitimately depend. I think there are some people whose skills match sought after keywords and they're fine with those positions. If you've got a more eclectic (and often more senior with varied types of experience), keywords probably don't help much at all.
- decafninja 6y ago
  I don't bother with online applications anymore - I don't think I've ever had a single experience where doing so didn't result in an automated rejection letter or simply no response. Seems like a total waste of time. Applying via human connections (whether it be a friend, coworker, or even a recruiter - first or third party) has been tremendously more successful.
fallingknife 6y ago
Google did a study on what elements of the hiring process correlated with good performance and found that references we're almost useless.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  Google is Google. They hire _VAST_ numbers of people straight out of college. It's practically a pipeline for them. I am not saying that neglecting referrals from professional contacts doesn't work for Google, but rather that it's commonplace and "good enough" for other places. Moreover, from the point of view of an individual rather than the employer's performance metrics, it's generally better to make a human connection if you're just talking about the chances of getting hired.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

toyg 6y ago

Disappointing that a BBC piece does not cover any UK-based business in this sector, like Arctic Shores (https://www.arcticshores.com/ https://www.arcticshores.com/). The journalist lives in NYC but these days that shouldn't really matter...

sfg 6y ago

"AI can help evaluate all those candidates in a very consistent way," he says." Which, if applied across an industry, means someone will be consistently rejected; where as now they might have a chance of finding a position somewhere, as the intellects in each hiring process are different.

swalsh 6y ago

10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations, already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to treating people as "resources", completely dropping the word "human". We all need to think about the future we're building here.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Sounds a bit Black Mirror Complex. People were complaining about being treated as resources since the industrial revolution - and before then serfs knew that they were resources! More power than governments, seriously? The only time I have seen that rhetoric come up is complete fucking morons complaining about encryption and wanting to outlaw math.
- jcims 6y ago
  Help help! I’m being repressed! https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw
joshuahughes 6y ago
I wish it wasn't true, but the path we're headed down is pretty much set now. I can't help feeling that the habit of removing identifying markers (names, ages, etc) from resumes to try to ensure equality in hiring is also part of the same ill-fated direction. I dearly wish that the world I was leaving my kids wasn't so dehumanised.
- swalsh 6y ago
  It goes beyond resumes. Our criminal justice system also uses AI to make judgement decisions. I understand the need to eliminate bias from systems (though I question how much bias is actually being eliminated via these systems) but the need to humanize people when they are most vulnerable is important.
- 6y ago

JustARandomGuy 6y ago

Related story: I applied for a position with United Airlines a few months ago. I started the job application, then stopped in the middle for whatever reason. United’s job system emailed me at 9 PM a reminder to continue my application, and I completed it less than a half hour later. A half hour after that (just after 10 PM) United emailed me a rejection notice. So either some United recruiter was working late (I’m in the same time zone as United’s HQ) or my resume was completely rejected by a bot. It’s pretty annoying to put in all that work and get a rejection so quickly.

heelix 6y ago
Very early in my career, I did an open house where I chatted with their principal architect and got hired. A few weeks later, after I had been working for a week, I received a letter from HR rejecting me. I wandered over to the HR office and meekly asked if I was still employed - and thankfully was. Apparently they had just gotten to screening the resumes that were handed in at the open house.
xyzelement 6y ago
Don't know if this is the case with United but I experienced a few companies where the first round of recruiting defense was in India - so it's possible someone got your app in the middle of their workday.
gifnamething 6y ago
And now you're presumably much less likely to try applying again, regardless of how well you fit future openings. They burnt the bridge. The equivalent for you would be turning down a job offer with 4-letter words. In many areas there aren't enough skilled candidates for this to be sustainable.

cullinap 6y ago

This reminds me of the nfl combine but for jobs. There are plenty of examples of players that do well in the combine but fail in the nfl. Your test just selects for individuals who are good at testing and not necessarily good at their potential job.

aboringusername 6y ago

Computers decide if you get a job (and access to a resource called "money", pretty important for living). Computers decide if your Google accounts gets deleted, without warning. Computers decide if you can get credit, or open a bank, or participate in society. And there is 0, yup, 0 accountability. Computer doesn't like you? Tough shit, get fucked, nothing you can do. If you don't have an internet connection, you're fucked. If you don't have fast upload speeds and a capability to record video and are willing to store it on someone else's computer (where they will datamine it and use it against you in the future, or it'll be "leaked"/sold) then you're fucked. So now, to get a job I need: To participate in surveillance and trading of my data where it'll be data raped A smart phone A fast internet connection So great, fuck you to all the poor people I guess who find technology hard, they can just go die. I'm beginning to think computers were the biggest mistake humans ever made. We need regulation and fast against this sort of thing, to make the hiring process fair and accessible to everyone.

encom 6y ago
This is maybe true in Silicon Valley. Not in the real world. Also, nobody needs a Google account.
- mafuy 6y ago
  I wish it were as you say. Effectively, at least a facebook account was needed at two of the universities I was at. I've also seen instances of important (even life threatening) information being transmitted via social networks, exclusively. So yes, sometimes you pretty much have to be part of that game.
d1zzy 6y ago
Computers are just a tool, they're great at processing lots of data very fast. That makes certain types of tasks a good fit for them. None of the things you mentioned were necessarily better before computers, they simply used other methods to do the selection. But that doesn't mean those methods were better. > I'm beginning to think computers were the biggest mistake humans ever made. We need regulation and fast against this sort of thing, to make the hiring process fair and accessible to everyone. It was never fair and accessible to everyone (for those companies that would employ algorithm based resume screening). Just that instead of whatever other arbitrary mechanism they had used until now to filter out candidates they now use "AI". It's good to be trying to find better solutions to these problems, but don't rile up against computers because computers might be part of the solution.

SharpeDidntFoul 6y ago

You can pay about $250 for someone to optimize your resume with certain key words, punctuation, and formatting choices to make it through these systems. I did this and it worked. I was going for entry level finance roles in tech and finance. I went to a top 40 finance program, interned at Morgan Stanley, a hedge fund, and a respectable incubator, but had a hard time getting replies to my job applications. I used all the help and resources from my university's career center and followed everything on the infamous "Mergers and Inquisitions" website, which is supposed to be the holy grail of career guidance and resume formatting for finance majors. I had my resume looked at my everyone I could get critiques and edits from. I wasn't getting answers from my applications. After hiring someone to change the formatting, I got automated replies saying that they liked my resume and would reach out to schedule a phone screening. Same person, same level of "professionalism" on the resume, same experience, just different key words and seemingly arbitrary formatting choices to please the AI overlords. I found 5 people claiming to optimize resumes for algorithms for the sorts of jobs I wanted. They all had high reviews from customers. I then asked them all questions through email and phone calls to see if they actually knew what they were talking about. I picked the one who appeared the best. Not only did she have some personal proximity to the space, but she seemed to know all of the nuances of how to please the resume algos. It was the best $250 I ever spent. Point is, people are cracking these processes, it feels arbitrary but that's how the game works now if your a job seeker. Whether if be something like a resume screener or something of this level that claims to be able to understand your personality in 25 minutes, you can crack the system. If your hiring, I can't imagine how confusing this whole mess is on top of your already busy work day, but it's easy to manipulate these screening software products to make them think whatever you want. I've met many sketchy software sales people who just schlep useless enterprise products at businesses. I wonder how much of the enterprise SaaS world is made up of this sort of thing.

fiestaman 6y ago
I'm applying to stuff right now, mind emailing me this person's information?
- meremortals 6y ago

libtorte 6y ago

I find the concept of not being allowed to hire (or not hire) whoever you want horrifying. My life goal is to get my kids to a level where they can afford to refuse to take demeaning tests. But if companies want do employ them, they should be allowed to do so.

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

Yeah it sucks computers do this but its important to remember people can be equally cruel. Big tech companies who need talent arbitrarily accept/reject candidates based on resume buzzwords and whether they can leetcode. But the long tail of small companies, often run by idiots or frat bros of some kind will reject you for reasons stupider still - dont like hair, not hot enough, can only drink 2 beers?, only knows Java LMAO. In other industries, psychometrics are common and even effective. I remember one dull self help author talking about how insurance companies screen for optimism because lol you're gonna need it to consistently make 100 calls a day, knowing only 5 people will buy. Meaning forget merit, EVEN IF you make it past the randomness filter, your interview & job performance is determined based on largely immoveable parts of your personality. Don't forget, the corporate world outside of the rarefied space of tech is an absolute shit show. Whenever i feel like ranting against how shitty AI is, remember folks, i remember the majority of humans suck too. It gives me a warm, cozy feeling like I'm a turkey the day before thanksgiving.

valentinemsmith 6y ago

This reminds me of when I was working for an EdTech startup nearly a decade ago where the CEO invented his own “Mini Myers Briggs” test, and we developed a “feature” to reject any teachers applying who came back INTJ after filling out that stupid test. The CEO adamantly believed INTJs didn’t make good teachers.

pavel_lishin 6y ago

> "Everyone wants the right job, and to hire the right person. It doesn't benefit anyone for the match to be off. Trying to use these AI systems in smart ways is to everyone's advantage." I mean, that's flagrantly untrue. There are plenty of, I hesitate to use the term "bad actors", but people who will lie and embellish their resume, tailor their answers to these personality quizzes in an optimal way, and otherwise game the system to maximize their payoff - which is to get hired.

microtherion 6y ago

Yes, those AI systems surely create garbage results right now, and worse, once they are trained perfectly, they will provide perfect cover to codify existing hiring biases: 1. Take existing employee base, hired through biased process. 2. Use resumes to train multi-million parameter machine learning model. 3. System will replicate biases, while the process is completely opaque to review by even the people who created it. But then again, existing hiring practices are just as bad, e.g. hiring European engineers only if they graduated from Oxford, Cambridge, or the University of Bucharest: https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864 https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864 Or the still widespread practice in Switzerland to demand hand written job applications for executive positions, in order to have the applications evaluated by graphologists…

908B64B197 6y ago
This has to be a prank somehow. The list of North American universities makes no sense. Some co-op technical college I never heard of listed along Stanford/MIT.

totetsu 6y ago

When I took one one of these things for a temping company a few years back, and it was asking me about basic Excel things, I took a look at the network traffic in the browser. I could see it was just like "question 2, pass yes, respons time 10s" in JSON. So I feed it through portswigger burp proxy and modified the responses as they went. I still think I was demonstrating basic IT skills.

learc83 6y ago

I’ve worked in the HR tech space and we integrated with all of the big applicant tracking systems. Many of them have screening questions. So you can ask something like “can you lift 50 lbs?” And set it up so answering no will screen the candidate out. But even in that case recruiters and hiring managers will usually still look at the candidate anyway. There are also 3rd party addons that will score candidates, and resume parsers that will let recruiters search resumes for keywords. But as far as I know there are no widely used AI solutions that will actually flat out reject candidates with no human intervention. Even if it worked, the risk is too great that your model will start over rejecting people from protected classes and no one will notice until you’re hit with a lawsuit.

indymike 6y ago
Most of the AI I've seen is really just a database query dressed up with a HAL-9000 eyeball camera or something. A good example is a license expiration date. It says it expired four years ago. problem is that candidate data is largely parsed from randomly formatted resume files, so it's not that accurate and as a result, the date from the college graduation ended up in the license field.

oksurewhynot 6y ago

From Pymetrics' CEO's Linkedin: Avid technophile who believes audited AI can act like CRISPR: retaining all the wisdom of humans while stripping out ineradicable bias. lol wut