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.

  • TehPers
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    124 months ago

    Building off your last point, with AI models, bias can come in ways you might not expect. For example, I once saw a model that was trained with diversity in mind, but then only ever output Asian people with a high bias towards women. It seems to me like diversity is something that is difficult to train into a model since it’d be really difficult not to overfit it on a specific demographic.

    It might be interesting to see if a random input into the model could be used to increase the diversity of the model outputs. This doesn’t really help with resume screening tools though (which are probably classifiers), only really generative models.

    • AggressivelyPassive
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      34 months ago

      There isn’t really a good way to even define for diversity.

      The bad approach is the corporate token diversity, where every picture has to include a white, a black and an asian person, at least 50% have to be women and one of them has to wear a hijab. That might include many groups, but isn’t really representative.

      You could also use the “blind test” approach many tech solutions are using, where you simply leave out any hints to cultural background, but as has been shown, if the underlying data is biased, AIs will find that (for example by devaluing certain zip codes).

      And of course there’s the “equal opportunity” approach, where you try to represent the relevant groups in your selection like they are in the underlying population, but that is essentially *-ism by another name.