Automated hiring software is mistakenly rejecting millions of job candidates

It's not so much the software per se to blame as the facile criteria implemented by the software.

Employment Equity Legislation should require Companies and recruiters to disclose the criteria used in their resume screening programs.

Applicants rejected by resume screening programs should be notified of what criteria resulted in their rejection.

Employment equity commissions should be empowered to receive complaints against resume screening software and require changes to discriminatory criteria.

This has created an entire new automated “career counseling” industry that caters to exactly this insanity by doing a pre validation of resumes against Fortune 500 hiring systems to validate percentage of keywords are met before submitting so they don’t get filtered out… for a price.

What's better is that EU based companies are using American hiring software (lever, successfactors, workday, etc). Americans have no cultural sensitivity whatsoever, and the general professional and educational landscape varies widely on both continents. Yet the companies are hiring someone, whom? No idea, those hired are desperate to keep their jobs and will deal with any bullshit, bringing in more desperate cheap people from far Eastern Europe and Southern Asia. After 3-5 years of consolidations and "AI", we'll have perfect candidate profiling with fingerprinting and global blacklists. I'm so happy I don't have to search for a job, I'm one leg out of the industry. Just keep in mind that software created in such environments will destroy your health, life, infrastructure, and money. I'm back to printing stuff, filling forms, and sending letters when possible.

The interesting thing is that this situation has finally become critical enough that people are taking action.

> Nearly nine out of 10 executives surveyed for the report said they knew automated software was mistakenly filtering out viable candidates, with some saying they were exploring alternate ways to hire candidates.

This issue has been well known among technically skilled fields, with tricks like aggregating technical experience up into larger numbers by writing it like "X years programming experience including: Framework A, Framework B, Framework C" having become no longer a trick but normal practice well over a decade ago. Everyone knew it was stupid but if your online job form gets 6000 applicants what else can you do? But it's clearly reached a point where the automatic filtering has become an unsustainable mechanism and companies are reacting.

What I find wished they had asked is what alternatives are those companies exploring? Who is building alternative hiring pipelines? or are we seeing a rise in "I hired someone I knew" as an accepted practice?

Does that mean thousands of other companies mistakenly get job candidates because they have better job screening process than those with software rejecting millions of them? Or even no rational job screening process at all?

I have to say both type of companies get what they deserve.

These guys have come up with a solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443610 -- Peer to peer recruiting.

Ah, the efficiency of software. Ain't it grand?

This software is working as intended. Its supposed to be a screen. Its doing that well. I know this sounds crass and crude but that is capitalism for you.