tech

AI is taking over job hiring, but can it be racist?

20 Comments
By Avi Asher-Schapiro

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Enough.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

HR AI selecting AI created resume for a job developing HR AI...

Today resumes are screened by automated devices that basically do a key word search. I knew some 15 years ago (when I last did a serious job search) to ensure I used as many of the words from the job description as I could in my resume. It wasn't so much a matter of your particular skills and experiences but making sure you couched these qualities of yours in the words the search engine would hit on. I'm sure in short order savvy job seekers will have figured out how to game AI to get one's resume in front of a human who can set up an interview.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Are they racist? Or just logical?

-3 ( +0 / -3 )

Baseball does it BIG TIME! In the old days a scout would go out an assess a athletes natural ability to see if he had the five tools needed to play professional baseball and it depended on where you would end up in the draft. Now days you have a scout he goes out and he looks at the athletes send in his report based on what he has seen as far as his natural ability to play the position height, weight and looking at the size of his parents. From there the data is given to the analyst. Based on how many hits this athlete had in high school or college etc.. the bean counting analyst with their computer stats come out with the projections of what this potential athlete will produce based on all the data they have and the position he is being drafted in. Not only do they do it for drafting they do it for all the players in the big leagues they know what pitch a batter can handle the best location to throw and also where he actually hits the ball to. Its crazy!!!

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

"and I didn't go to a top university"

Well, there you go. It isn't your race or your first-generation college student status. Latino race is a plus now. First-generation college status isn't going to show up in the AI filters. But they certainly program the algorithms to take into account the college the person attended.

I read an article last year which indicated that hiring managers, when facing thousands of nearly identical resumes, will sort by colleges - assuming the student who managed to get into an elite school is more likely to have greater intelligence, drive and motivation, than students who didn't get into such schools. In fact, it is similar to Japan. Everybody wants the student who attended Tokyo, Kyoto, Keio or Waseda. They don't want the students who went to schools no one has ever heard of.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

HR AI selecting AI created resume for a job developing HR AI...

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Ultimately it does not matter how "colorblind" they make these algorithms, because the hiring decision still rests with real life people. And we all know there will always be personal biases in the hiring process whether it be discrimination based on rage, sex, age, or other factors that are technically protected under the law, but not very enforceable (and employers know it). The computer algorithm may pick the ideal candidate based on its programs, but the hiring manager can take one look at the person's appearance and not hire the person and use the safe "thank you for applying but we have decided to move on" excuse.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Can you sue an algorithm?

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

Because, even the word: “Racism” can be used as ‘a tool’ to easily manipulate ‘weak-minded persons’…

- @Boku Dayo 9:49am: “Why does everything have to be tied into "racism"???” -

… and, to further ‘control the distribution of limited resources within a given population’.

Even before the advent A.I., royalty, empires, dictators, politicians, governments, religions, corporations, educational institutions, media, etc

have all employed “racism”, in some form, to work to their advantage and less, for the disadvantaged people they want to subjugate.

0 ( +2 / -2 )

Terminator Mk 1

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

I would not want any business of mine to rely on this sort of tech. HR is important and I would want the people to be doing the hiring

If you own a large corporations good luck with that, you will need an HR department equal to all others put together.

2 years ago I put an ad looking for an apprentice to learn and work as in a Japanese artisanal craft.

I put this ad on a small job site I reviewed over 5,000 applications from around the world Japan, the USA, Russia, China, Australia, Canada UK nearly every country in the EU and the list goes on.

I had no possibility of reading them all, that was for a training job that paid nearly nothing ( old style Japanese apprenticeship as I did living with us food lodging includes).

I dropped the whole idea in the end.

But if I got over 5,000 for that I cannot even begin to guess what some major corporation or a really good paying job must get in the amount of applications.

My wife's company put out the word (no online ad only headhunters) for an executive position for Japanese and got several thousand CVs sent to them.

The days of the local paper ad are long gone, any job now will end up on the web and generate thousands of not tens of thousands of applicants, some form of automated filtering is needed even if it just cuts out those without the needed university degree or language skills.

0 ( +3 / -3 )

Why does everything have to be tied into "racism"???

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

Bias is likely. Good machine learning tries to mimic human responses, so it will mimic their bias too. That means you don't really want 'AI', you want 'robotic' - Programmed behaviours that actively erase human bias. But even if you intervene and directly program the tech, rather than 'teaching' it from real world examples, it won't be up to the job. Tech cannot contextualise the data it takes in, the way an experienced human can.

I would not want any business of mine to rely on this sort of tech. HR is important and I would want the people to be doing the hiring to be really good at it. New hires are your firm's future. You'd have to be insane to rely on some third party bunch of algorithms over a good interviewer that you trust. All these companies are doing is shifting responsibility for bad decisions on to technology.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

You also had some interesting ideas last week @Antiquesavings 9:17am about A.I., allegedly, at use within this comments section for example. Can you elaborate sine it would be ‘on topic’ here, today?

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

You make significant points @Numan 9:03am:

- Q:“..taking over job hiring, but can A.I. be racist?”

- A: “No, but the programmers can be. The people paying them to actually create the algorithm.

Therefore, do you mean the answer is possibly: Yes, it can be programmed as such?

0 ( +2 / -2 )

This all gets tiring.

In Canada we have all these groups going on about discrimination, white privilege, etc... But one group is 90% silent and they as a group are 15% of the population and leaders of many of the major corporations, government, etc.. Asians instead of always blaming someone or something they get educated, push forward and now are a powerhouse to the point they are now a target of BLM and the like claiming the Asians and whites are racist.

-2 ( +3 / -5 )

Its still has problems differentiating between buraku people and apes.

thats why is pull off line in the first place

-6 ( +1 / -7 )

Hm, does it mean that AI proves that bias and discrimination is an optimal approach in people selection? ;)

2 ( +4 / -2 )

No, but the programmers can be. The people paying them to actually create the algorithm.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

It doesn't even work properly in the first place.

1 ( +3 / -2 )

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