The computers rejecting job applications
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
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.
Asking for a friend...
'Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With'
Underneath is a Laundry list of today's sexiest technologies.
It's not quite as advanced as your suggestion, but it's pretty effective. It's also a good icebreaker when you have the in person interview.
It's part of the filtering process to determine what subset you want to target, but learn something new as often as you can. The bonus I've learned over time is the more paradigms, tools, and technologies I learn and practice configuring and launching sample apps or solving simple challenges with, the more they all start to look and feel the same.
I.e. if you are working on anything that is currently a 'web app' of some sort, then depending on what company you were at, you would either be using one framework or another. So you might write in the "I know technology X" column things like "jQuery, React", because your last job used JQuery, then they grew up and switched to React. In the "I don't know technology Y" column, you write things like "BackboneJS, AngularJS" etc. (the actual lists would be much longer, this is just to take an example). You're still current if you use either Angular or React it just happens that you (or someone at your company) didn't choose one but the other. And then there's the myriad of other frameworks that come and go or that a particular niche of companies might prefer. If you're a web app FE or full stack guy you can still pick any of these up easily enough, so it makes sense to list them for the "pattern matching HR drones" (or computers :)) to get the interview.
If you bring nothing but J2EE 1.4 experience I'm going to assume you've carved out a focused niche. I'll steer the interview towards broad, modern practices and technologies.
If your resume talks about nothing but modern technologies, I'll try to dive deep to be sure you aren't a dilettante with surface knowledge in a ton of things but no deep capabilities where it matters to $company.
In general the best resumes show a balance of deep expertise in foundational tech and exposure to new technologies. A dev might have done Python for a decade but has started poking at Elixir, an ops person knows Linux like the back of their hand before they start talking about Kube, etc.
All I can say: in my experience, the engineers I've hired with deep (but potentially old) experience and with balanced resumes have been better performers and more likely to stick around than those who bounce around tech to tech.
In my experience, it's useful to have a couple 'jack-of-all-trades' types on the team, but you wouldn't want all your engineers to be broad but shallow. I did a stint in the military to pay for college, and something we'd point out was that it was better to have something 'good enough' right now than something perfect a thousand miles away. Breadth of experience is also handy when trying to innovate a novel solution.
But I don't have any better evidence than you. I've never worked anywhere large enough to have that sort of data where we could demonstrate quantitatively that one method works better than another, and of course the metrics are all fairly arbitrary themselves.
Employers tend to want people with the right skills but they seldom allow time to develop those skills.
This is just normal stuff.
I get people hitting me up on Linked In for tech that I outgrew 10 years ago. I can either take them off entirely (making me look very 1 dimensional) or counterbalance that with things I'd love for someone to pay me to learn.
I haven't made any decisions so far so the status continues to remain quo.
This is normal! If the hiring managers will reject CVs that have hobbies and you find them valuable information, what you're experiencing is a culture mismatch. That's effective filtering, before you're saddled with a new job contract. Viewing a job application like school, where you're guaranteed a certain result if you have the right talent and work ethic, is the wrong model and will lead to disappointment. It's fundamentally a relationship, so should be viewed like dating.
If I one day become one of HN's fabled star engineers that can have any job they want, I'd like to write a CV in a markdown text file. That's how I really disseminate information in my working life, not Latex.
[1] Having the proper number of pages is an important signal that you are also proper and well educated, i.e. the correct social class.
The desire to learn and adapt is probably one of the most important thing in Software.
The ability to take a look at oneself and identify blind spots/weaknesses in ones knowledge and skills is also a great indicator this person won't become an "expert beginner".
Personal Information ... 1
Education and Certifications ... 1
Previous Experience ... 1:2
Known Technologies ... 2
Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With ... 2:348
[0] https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/06/19/fa...
I once scraped a bunch of job postings and did a simple word frequency count. Just eyeballing the list, I picked out a few of the most commonly mentioned techs and skills. By just rewording a few of my resume entries, it seemed to increase my response rate by quite a bit.
For example, in the description of one project I added "using JSON". It wasn't particularly important to that project that the exchange format used was JSON, but apparently many of those doing hiring are seeing fit to include that in their searches.
(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.
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.
Emphasizing this point for others. This is the best way to approach it IMO.
The company should work to impress you as much as you work to impress them.
This becomes more true the further in your career you go. But for entry level positions it's really just a numbers game.
Good money for a few months.
On the other hand, the use of these measures by big corps very well might be pseudo-scientific. I generally object to psychometrics being applied to prospective employees; it feels very dystopian to me. I also know that these measures require more subtle interpretation--and caution--than you're likely to get from anyone in HR, especially when we are talking about making inferences about individuals rather than groups of individuals.
How do you find people you can take seriously? Who don’t just quote psychology today and act like it’s insight? Like I know the field is professional and has skilled professionals - but how do you find them?
There's at least one way this is beneficial for the employer: Desperate, obsequious job-seekers will be more willing to tolerate the degradation of being judged by a computer. It's perfect for finding employees who will ask "How high?" when you tell them to jump.
I applied to a few jobs at United Healthcare and they kept sending me HireVue interview invitations. Every time I rejected them and when prompted for feedback I said I don't want to be evaluated by a computer. Never heard anything from them (and didn't expect to).
Love it.
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."
"This will go down in your permanent record" comes to mind.
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.
I can't believe stack ranking ever caught on.
Your bottom-most Harvard PhD is unlikely to find himself in the top 10% when mixed into a general population because other human factors come into play, not the least of which is it's incredibly time consuming to review and re-rank every person. So managers tend to leave people where they landed because fatigue eventually sets in.
This in turn inspires other behaviors that are not really what the designer envisioned. For example one manager used to carry around a book of every mistake other teams made: if anyone challenged the ranking of one of his employees he'd start firing off potshots at the other manager's org. Needless to say his rankings were left alone. The irony is not lost on me that this manager eventually left to start a company that allegedly uses AI somehow to help people identify the best candidates. He spent his days subverting a system meant to measure employee performance and now claims expertise in finding the best performing employees.
The question is whether it's ever possible to devise an accurate measure of value quantitatively. Even if your job is press the red button, a person with low numbers might be such an inspiration to the team that everyone else works 15% faster, more than making up for their shortcoming. And you can't possibly anticipate all such factors in advance.
Unless every employee does the exact same work your ranking system will never be accurate. The difference in the difficulty of jobs will dominate the difference in competence.
The fact that the practice is immediately visible as stupid does not stop real companies from adopting it.
Therefore, they're mostly luck.
They mean qualified engineers. There are a lot of completely clueless applicants for every programming job out there. The lack of formal certification sure doesn't help with that.
You don't want people to delight in the prospect of working with one of your competitors. That's far, far worse than just missing out on hiring them and never getting a second shot.
There is also, I think, a false economy in having one person talk to an individual on their own. There is no one to see how that interaction goes. If I were in a protected class, you've also created a liability for yourself by having nobody to corroborate an exchange.
We are trying to make an inherently expensive process cheap and we are breaking everything in the process. We didn't fix deployments by doing fewer of them. Why do we think we're going to fix the onboarding process by avoidance? Finding and training people is part of building a team, which is necessary to build a product. If you have a bunch of people pushing back on the obvious parts, they're probably pushing back on the rest of it too, making little empires for themselves at the expense of their peers, the product, and the company.
We used to use referrals instead of cattle calls to fix this problem, but we don't like the kinds of hiring biases this brings in and so we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Now we have all of the worst, dehumanizing attributes of a lottery system, and not really many benefits from doing so.
Probably what we are all not learning from this decades long experiment is that if you haven't solved your diversity problem before you are famous enough to have an embarrassment of riches in your inbox, then you never will. Everything that comes after is a series of rear-guard actions trying to replace bad decisions with less bad ones, failing as often as succeeding, and justifying your arbitrary decisions as more merciful than the alternative, when in fact you mean more merciful for yourself.
Right now, for instance, I've been keeping my eye on José Valim (Elixir), because I have a suspicion that his team may have cracked that nut already, or soon will.
It'd be either based on the file-name when they were all printed, or the order they came in, or based on some weird method the printer uses, but they'd be some implicit order.
So the candiates were unlucky, it's just the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to think about the biases... oddly relevant when talking about managers out-sourcing their racism/classism/agism/sexism/elitism/whateverism to AI.
Given a pile of CVs
Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368)
Dump that 40%
Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you have just dumped
It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which one to pick.
While there is a short time window in which multiple candidates might be evaluated, this approach is pretty close to the assumptions of the secretary problem.
You may not have been at an organization with a policy that unfilled positions after X time get removed. When you get close to the end of the time, there's pressure to hire someone, even if they're not great, because otherwise you'll lose the position.
On the other hand, I have had a case where someone was not hired for a position, and then later was asked to interview for a different position with the same hiring manager, and was hired for that.
1. Should always insist on a first phone interview
2. Ask the hiring manager why he believes that you are a good match for the position.
Of course there's software tricks you could have used as well.
Besides the fact that it's stupid and somewhat embarassing.
We had some of those too there’d also be this webcam screen thing where you answer vague interpersonal questions as the camera looks at you.
It would be great if you gave them feedback along the same lines, although chances are it would just get ignored.
Fascinating that should carry over into the 21st century hiring process.
I did really enjoy surfing in California Games.
It's a pure win on their side.
As an engineer, you want to increase your value contribution to the org and the org should see you the same way. This usually means look for software product companies with at least some meritocracy. It should be about software all the way down.
In any other scenario, it's about something else, usually pleasing the boss, you are a servant, and good luck with that.
You might be giving them too much credit. I suspect that may have been the original intent of the question, but was mindlessly aped after appearing in an article by countless hiring managers and recruiters.
Merit-driven applicant: This test is not backed by science, does not measure anything related to performance relevant to the job and is arbitrary. Oh, and did you check how do the developers of the test address the fundamental problem of lack of replicability and reproducibility in psychology?
Hiring (if they can actually articulate and self-reflect, a rare occurrence): So you think you're smarter than us?
Subservient applicant: I gave this test 110%, thank you for this opportunity! I look forward to learn more about how I can contribute to the continued success of [org name]!
Speaking to a mediocre manager with a very stable career, tt was a revelation for me to hear them say "smart people get frustrated quickly. I've learned through the years to select those that are agreeable". Value and value creation were not on that managers radar.
That might make sense if you're hiring people to dig holes in the ground but seems absurd to use as a filter for any sort of skilled professional position.
Ignorance can be fixed relatively easily compared to poor personality traits.
I think somewhere here is a conflation between "ignorance" and "intelligence".
First priority is to get someone who doesn't stir up unnecessary shit.
Second priority, get someone smart.
Third priority, get someone who already knows the tech.
I don't think companies should be administering psychometric tests. But it doesn't make the task you refused to do meaningless.
Did they say it was? I'd withdraw my application too. There's no good reason for it, just bad reasons that they think are good.
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.
Also, nobody needs a Google account.
> 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.
Computers are powerful tools and can be put to both constructive and destructive purposes. I'm hopeful that at least some societies will figure out sensible limitations on what use they can be put to.
Don't you dare get fired either. Better not accidently work for a company that tells you to do something grossly unethical, or illegal. Don't accidently be a part of a negative news/viral social media story. Doesn't matter if it's wrong, they'll just print a tiny retraction in fine print and leave the main article at the top of google.
Then there's the justice system. Why does getting busted for anything permanently make you a second class citizen? We talk so much shit about China, but the USA, and the elite in our country definitely has a no-no list that will give a life sentence as the "untouchable class".
Of course, we let a few talented "untouchables" advance to the middle class (it helps if you were previously a member). I actually have a bit of a conspiracy theory about this. Amazon and others have commercials bragging about hiring ex-cons. I think they might use this market to bring wages down. Essentially, they pick from the cream of the crop, with the most benign offenses, and best sob story; you can pay them whatever, they'll be thrilled for any middle class chance!
P.S. I know what China does is worse, and some of the specific reasons why, but sometimes I'm not so sure.
We all need to think about the future we're building here.
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.
What? There is well documented and clear evidence that these indicators actually lead to highly biased decisions regarding who gets interviewed. Removing them is the right thing to do.
My point was a more general one, that we are being sucked into a strangely anti-human world where those in power would like nothing more than to reduce us to a mere employee number. Just data in a spreadsheet. It's so much less messy that way, right?
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)
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.
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.
Reading this tweet in depth disagrees with a lot of my experience in Fortune 500 tech companies. Can’t figure out the misunderstanding.
I can't conclusively say one way or the other. I have been a hiring manager at a F500 tech company and have never seen direct evidence of any automatic filtering or rejections.
Anyone speaking with complete confidence in either direction needs to bring actual evidence...
There’s no evidence to bring? Like, in the case of bunch of people bringing personal anecdotes you can still create a sense of truth without evidence Christ.
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.
Applying via human connections (whether it be a friend, coworker, or even a recruiter - first or third party) has been tremendously more successful.
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.
It would be different if you could randomly call 3 people they worked with at their last company, but I don't think anyone does that.
Or telling your boss "hey, my buddy is looking for a new job, I'll shoot you the resume"?
The former seems fairly useless, the latter seems useful
It’s pretty annoying to put in all that work and get a rejection so quickly.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
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…
The list of North American universities makes no sense. Some co-op technical college I never heard of listed along Stanford/MIT.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If we must do these tests, I should be able to take one or a few of these and keep that as a record and not have to do them again. But instead, I have to repeat the process for every company that gives them (recently, Berkshire-Hathaway and it had to be done before anyone would even speak about the position). These things rarely test for job-specific skills and are supposedly generalized intelligence tests, so the skills should be widely applicable, and therefore I shouldn't have to repeat this often. Hell, I do less for a drivers license renewal and 2 tons of metal at 60 mph is more lethal than most jobs behind these tests. Typically they've been math, reading comprehension, word association, memory, personality, and abstract/spatial thinking, which, frankly, was already done through high school and college. If the goal was finding signals for successful applicants, they already have had these signals.
To me, that says they're less interested in finding out how smart you are, and it's really more of a filtering tool where science is being used to give it more credibility than it deserves.
And of course, referring to the article, because it's AI, there's a gray area of accountability that I don't think the legal process has caught up with yet.
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:
I have yet to witness an hiring process that isn't biased. As an anecdote, in a past small business job, a colleage (that accumulated the hiring manager hat) used to choose people (always opposite sex) by photo and had even the literal approval of the company owner to do so. To corroborate this, I remember two persons "hired by photo" commenting that they never had any trouble getting job interviews. It may indicate that "hiring by photo" is rather common.
We like to forget that most jobs don't allow 10X'ers. Choosing "the best" is normally just a form of "early optimization". My take on this (but I might be biased) is trial most and only hire who adds enough value.
That being said, German culture dictates that resumes have pictures, so it's sort of moot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing"
Which presumably means that they can be used as a filter so long as a human is making the final selection.
Avid technophile who believes audited AI can act like CRISPR: retaining all the wisdom of humans while stripping out ineradicable bias.
lol wut
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.
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.
(Or not, in which case I'd be surprised.)
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.”