AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants::As firms increasingly rely on artificial intelligence-driven hiring platforms, many highly qualified candidates are finding themselves on the cutting room floor.
A business that relies on blackbox AI decision making, when dealing with people, cares not about being accurate or fair, and adopts technology on the fallacy / stupidity of appeal to novelty instead of analysing its overall impact.
IMO this practice should be forbidden.
AI filtering has the promise of selecting good candidates very efficiently, due to pattern recognition on a level not immediately obvious to humans. Unfortunately no company is going to train their own hiring models, and good ones don’t exist on the market. Everyone vaguely competent is chasing LLMs and image generation. Specialized, focused models are almost forgotten in the hype.
So they just go with a commercial “enterprise” tool which are as we all know utter shite. HR AI tools are even worse than your typical fake “AI”.
There are two additional issues, related to each other:
- opacity - most of the time you have no clue on what prompted the model to output one or another “decision”
- responsibility - no matter how good or bad it is, software is not a moral agent, thus it should not be put in charge of decisions concerning human beings
Based on that I think that a better approach would be to use the AI model to create a filter, that can be analysed and tweaked by human beings, and then use that filter to select candidates. They won’t do this though - because it screws with their “I did nothing!!! the ai did it!!” excuse to be unfair.
But the way that it is now, frankly? Better to ban it.
Damn, that’s an angle i hadn’t been considering–the “AI did it, not me!” accountability loophole. Air Canada was just attempting to pull that on a customer that was given wrong info by a customer service bot. They only managed to get Air Canada to make good on their offer for bereavement rates when they were taken to court. Thanks AI!
Two categories of issues at play here:
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Companies will miss good talent when AI doesn’t prioritize the way they would otherwise have wanted, doesn’t understand candidate data, or AI hasn’t been trained how to prioritize on the areas a candidate has. With how quickly job markets can change it’s realistic a piece of software or website could rise in popularity and fall over the period of a few years and it might take that long to update and correctly test the damn AI models to recognize and prioritize. All of this should hurt the company and it’s their fault and will helpfully limit incentives to use AI or black box AI at least as was said above.
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Accountability - In the US, it’s illegal now if you have an employment practice (hiring, promotions, firing, etc.) that while it can’t be proven directly or evidence doesn’t exist for a specific case to win in court (prima facie) it can be shown on aggregate to have discriminatory outcomes for protected classes(race, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc.). It’s often impossible to find a smoking gun of “we don’t hire Protected Class X”, but if it can be shown that your employment practices lead to a protected class having much worse outcomes in a company or group, something can be shown to have disparate impact which is illegal and must be remedied.
I fully expect many shittily-trained, poorly or not tested “tools” to be sold and implemented by companies who will eventually be sued for disparate impact. There will be a frenzy of related suits between companies and the AI tool companies.
Creative destruction indeed.
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I hate how quickly “AI” has been adopted for tasks it is wholly incapable of doing well, merely fast.
This isn’t even a new thing. They just attached “AI” as a tagline for attention.
They’ve been using computers to automate going through resumes for eons at this point.
I don’t even really like people using AI to describe LLMs, it’s not really an AI. It has no agency, it’s basically a really complex copy and paste machine.
Ask Jeeves was better.
How was ask Jeeves so good for such a short time
AI doesn’t require agency. It just needs to show some intelligence in some areas.
It could be new. I’m sure there are loads of new start ups offering shitty ‘AI’ powered solutions that crappy c-suites are switching to because of buzzwords.
It’s even more annoying that this was so predictable. Big money wants AI to compete with workers do bad that they use it for exactly that even when it isn‘t capable. It doesn‘t matter if they lose productivity as long as it‘s a pain in the ass for you and me.
Survival of the fittest. Those companies will either change their ways or be overtaken by the others.
How much damage will they do in the mean time, though?
My experience in the past twenty years on both the looking and hiring end is that ultimately I don’t think AI changes anything.
You’ve just replaced humans in HR that have no fucking clue what to look for and relied on algorithms and key word searches to filter out the good people to just going to directly to algorithms that will do the same shit job.
At my job, it used to be the department managers who did interviews and made hiring decisions, but then they changed it so that HR would handle all of that. Ever since then, they’ve gone and hired the absolute shittiest people you can imagine. HR has no idea how to hire people or what to look for. They even hired a sex offender to work in an area where children are likely to be present because they never bothered to do a background check.
Yes, we’ve seen so called “experts” telling your personality from your handwriting, or stupid personality tests… HR sure can find convoluted ways to reject random applications.
I am on the other end of this. As an employer, job boards are now essentially useless. Worst of all, we pay per profile engaged. In order for us to verify that the profile is even tangentially a match, we have to engage, but the new algorithms are only providing poor matches. It used to be that we would pay per posting and we could engage with every profile that responded AND every profile that matched our keywords, at no extra costs (this shit costs over $10k per year).
The market is ripe for a competitor that offers services equivalent to what we had nearly twenty years ago.
Enshittification is a rot that ruins everything for everyone. Even the rich people trying richer will just end suffering from the total collapse of functioning society in the end.
Capitalism is a mental illness.
Every service is getting shittier with AI. They all suck. Hell, even autocorrect is worse.
Why not skip those companies and put a listing on your own company website? I feel like a big source of the issue is companies outsourcing this kind of thing to other companies. You are going to need to do some work on your own at some point.
Our default is Dice, Indeed, Facebook. Twatter, Mastodon, and our website. We’re too small and specialized for the website to work. If you know about us, chances are you know one of our people at which point it’s an “in network” referral.
EDIT: To be fair, nothing but the job boards and referrals work. Facebook, Twatter, LinkedIn, etc, are a waste of time and money.
To an extent, unless they are hiring a very large number of people, it’s likely going to get them less applicants.
As someone looking for a job right now, the idea of having to think of every company that might need a software developer, to go check their website, is paralyzing. And that’s not even taking into account companies on the other side of the country looking for a remote worker, that I’ve never heard of.
I am a seasoned professional that has over a decade in my field with very solid experience to match. And yet, I am simply getting either no response or a decline altogether. During Covid, I interviewed for over 30 positions. Some were promising but others I declined. I’m hearing crickets right now. It’s wild.
I was called by 3 different jobs (of the 50+ I’ve applied to) this week that I need a cover letter otherwise my resume goes straight in the trash. Which is wild because I know nobody is handwriting letters.
So off to generate a ChatGPT Cover Letter Bot I went. 🤞
Seriously? CVs are just dumb, I don’t understand why they are even still an option to submit, never mind being required. I would expect most to just ignore them since it’s literally just fluff.
They are an option because they are self perpetuating just like leet code.
I wrote one when I got my last job so I only look at resumes that have them.
Same reason colleges require stupid fucking essays. Just bullshit tradition and feeling like they’re important and have special Spidey senses in picking out good people.
I’ve been using gpt as well. Still no responses.
Same, it’s a stupid ge and I’m sick of playing it. Something will have to give eventually.
I have the same qualifications as the descriptions and even exactly what the job is looking for and don’t hear back. Some other jobs ask for interviews with 1 or 2 similar qualifications. It’s nuts.
Yeah, I will literally fit the exact description for a job, and then some, and not a fucking word. Insane. Like who the fuck are you looking for.
Not even the benefit of an interview is just weird. It doesn’t make sense.
I had one that I fit word for word but I have an AS and not a BS. My father in law works for the company for 22 years and puts in for it under his name as an endorsement. If I get hired he gets a bonus if I stay for a year. Nothing. Not even a phone interview. So dumb. And my degree is not a technical degree.
The schooling requirement for things like software development are getting out of hand too. I’ve been automatically rejected for junior positions because I lack a BS. I have 10+ years of experience doing exactly what they are looking for.
One job and had the exact required certifications I have - no response
Same. Not a single interview in the past 500 apps.
I’ve applied to hundreds, I’ve got a single interview. The only others calling me have been recruiters.
Same. And I’ve been getting calls and interview requests for lower positions which I refuse to move to. I’m lucky that I have a good paying position at the moment so I don’t have to leave.
Well I think that is the macro environment we’re in more than anything. But who knows.
LinkedIn used to say how many people applied to a job. Some jobs I would see said 1000s of applicants now they changed it and it says “over 100” that’s an indicator that the job market is shit now. Companies have to use something to filter that many applications.
But sholdnt that product actually WORK? If its not working, then why pay for the product?
From the perspective of the decision maker it does “work”. It rejects a % of candidates in such a way they can pretend it’s objective rather than random. Imho, just randomly selecting 100 out of 2000 for human review would actually be more fair and give better results.
Eh… these numbers are often meaningless. I’ve heard directly from job posters that 99% of the applicants aren’t even within the location requirements (remote in the US being applied for by an Egyptian citizen for a non sponsor listing) and of the 1% remaining most are not qualified.
I was literally told “if your resume fits and you meet the other requirements, apply apply apply.”
I’m unfortunately in this world. Every application involves me scanning the job description and then trying to take key words and change up my skills section to try to match enough to catch the eye of an algorithm.
Sounds like we need AI-generated resumes
They exist in some form or another. None of them free.
So what you’re saying is that AI is the new Lawyers. When both sides use it, nothing improves but the lawyers/AI creators get richer.
You can already use Chat GPT to generate Cover Letters. It can’t be that large a leap to do the same for Resumes.
It’s all a fuckin nightmare. AI will be death of us all.
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There are services that do exactly that and they work. You tell it what type of job you’re applying by to and it tailors your CV to get through the systems so you get seen.
And those would be…?
Chat gpt? :p
My resume is shit. I refuse to put things on it just to fluff it up. I also never apply for jobs. I just put my resume up and people call me (I work in an industry that supports this behavior). Every resume I’ve ever submitted never got a reply.
I’m in the film industry. My resume is on IMDb. With the strikes last year I started looking for jobs outside the film world and made myself a resume and updates my LinkedIn page. I’ve been looking for over 3 months and so far no out of the industry replies, but I got two network studios that are talking to me for freelance work…
I got my job now because I have a lot of years working on older systems. This makes me a good candidate for transitioning old to new code. Don’t forget to list your old skills if you’re good at them.
I don’t know your industry, so bear with me, but if you can do something like manually splice film well, it’s not bad to mention it in a general resume online. You never know who will hit you up just because they did that back in the day too.
That’s the thing I like about my online resume vs my catered resume. I can provide more insight into my past to show I’m able to adapt well. I don’t usually mention, in the catered one, that I used to work at a fashion magazine because that was way back in 2007, and I’ve got more impressive positions than “junior developer,” but a lot of people ask about it in job interviews. A lot of wild stories.
I’m a camera operator. The issue is that last year there was some very intense strikes with the writers then with the actors unions which basically killed the entire industry for the whole year. Add to that the fact that our whole industry has been uplifted and redesigned by Netflix and Disney and the way streaming platforms work means that there is no work for anyone. I’m friend with people that usually work on major TV shows and movies all year long and they haven’t been on set for the last 6 months. So right now, no one is working. I tried to look for work in other sectors but all my experience has been in the audiovisual and film industry so it’s hard.
Yeah I can imagine. You might look into doing some legal videography (legal depositions). You don’t have to be licensed if you work under someone who is (this may vary in your area). If you have camera experience professionally, you’re already more than qualified. You can do a search in your area for that service and just apply directly to them for that position. It’s typically hourly, but it pays well. I did it out of college, and it was easy money for what is pretty much a fade in, sit for two hours, fade out.
Curious to know what industry that is.
Software. As someone who has been on the hiring end, I am bombarded with resumes. 90% of them are people in foreign countries who are most likely not even real people. The majority of resumes use the exact same template. When I do eventually find that looks real, I typically notice that they just list every single acronym in the book. Someone who focuses on nodejs and react with less than 20 years of experience is probably not going to have in-depth knowledge of ASP, PHP, JSP, Etc. So I get very skeptical, and often throw those in the trash. Sometimes they just copy and paste the requirements of my job posting and put that into their skills. At one job I even put some fake technologies in the posting just to see if anyone claimed to know it. Quite a few resumes had that technology listed.
When I put my résumé on a job site like dice or indeed, for example, employers search me out. It’s usually the person who would be directly above me, and not someone from human resources. I write my résumé for those people. I don’t list stuff I don’t wanna work in, I don’t list stuff that I don’t have extensive knowledge in. I’ve tried that game before, and all it did was embarrass me in interviews.
If a company uses AI tools without thinking, it should bear the consequences. Regardless if the AI fcks up hiring processes or hands out free money to customers like air Canada did.
I thought air Canada bot gave out wrong info to the customer, who the company then said wasn’t entitled to the rebate program the bot told the customer was a thing, so the customer had to sue them for the extra money the bot told the customer to spend. There was ANOTHER AI fuckup by aircanada? Lol
At this point, AI seems like a silly gimmick to these companies. We’re a stones throw away from the scene in South Park with Funnybot 5000 and the movie execs drilling it for hours for movie ideas.
