- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed “baseball” or “basketball” – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned “softball” – typically women – were downgraded.
Marginalised groups often “fall through the cracks, because they have different hobbies, they went to different schools”
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Thats ok… Idiotic hiring practices will filter out the worst companies
They won’t, though. Because these are cost-saving tools for multi-nationals with enormous capital footprints.
McDonalds isn’t going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get. The only real risk they run is in their poor ability to bring people on quickly resulting in storefronts more vulnerable to unionization or other labor actions. But this is a business that’s been vertically integrated for decades and subsists on enormous direct and indirect subsidies from every layer of government. They’ll keep being fine unless the political conditions in this country change significantly.
McDonalds isn’t going anywhere, no matter how bad their hiring practices get.
I disagree. Screwing up your hiring process is a Darwin Award level mistake for a company. McDonalds is very very good at hiring people and a big part of that is their willingness to hire people who aren’t good enough and then giving those people the training they need to succeed at work.
Choosing not to hire someone because they like baseball is insane and there’s no way that would fly at McDonalds.
I disagree. Screwing up your hiring process is a Darwin Award level mistake for a company.
Its only a screw-up if it upsets your investors. And it does not seem like the McDonalds EBITDA has suffered over the past few years.
Choosing not to hire someone because they like baseball is insane
The AI tool - according to the article - is using baseball and softball as a proxy for determining whether the applicant is a man or a woman, and biasing its selection accordingly. That’s not insane. Its just prejudiced in a manner that evades our comically ill-enforced nondiscrimination enforcement codes.
McDonald’s actually did suffer in some regard recently. Execs have admitted they need to lower prices or they’ll lose business.
I think the thing is, companies always go too far eventually. At some point, they cross the line and have to walk it back. We’ll probably see the same thing here. Recruiters will use more and more AI until someone crosses the line, and then there’ll be a rapid retreat.
Of course AI does has bias with casual racism and sexism. It’s been trained on a whole workforce that’s gone through the same.
I’ve gotten calls for jobs I’m way underqualified for with some sneaky tricks, which I’ll hint involves providing a resume that looks normal to human eyes, but when reduced to plaintext essentially regurgitates the job posting in full for a machine to read. Of course I don’t make it past 1 or 2 interviews in such cases but just a tip for my fellow Lemmings going through the bullshit process.
fucking bonkers that institutionalized racism can exist to such a degree that it shows up IN OUR COMPUTERS.
we’re so racist we made the computers discriminatory too.
I don’t think you know how LLM’s are trained then. It can become racist by mistake.
An example is, that there’s 100.000 white people and 50.000 black people in a society. The statistic shows that there has been hired 50% more white people than black. What does this tell you?
Obvious! There’s also 50% more white people to begin with, so black and white people are hired at the same rate! But what does the AI see?
It sees 50% increase in hiring white people. And then it can lean towards doing the same.
You see how this was / is in no way racist, but it ends up as it, as a consequence of something completely different.
TLDR People are still racist though, but it’s not always why the AI is.
I suppose it depends on how you define by mistake. Your example is an odd bit of narrowing the dataset, which I would certainly describe as an unintended error in the design. But the original is more pertinent- it wasn’t intended to be sexist (etc). But since it was designed to mimic us, it also copied our bad decisions.
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didnt they already do that? Just denying until the ultra perfect fit worker appears?
By simple keyword filtering, yeah. Anyone who spent 10 min doing a websearch on modern application processes would know to take keywords from the job post description and use them in a resume.
In the past ~5 years my company started using pre-recorded video screening too as an optional tool for hiring managers. So a candidate might be asked 1-3 short questions, they submit recordings of themselves answering, then the panel of HR and hiring managers could watch them.
As much as I dislike it from the perspective of a potential candidate, I like it from the perspective of a hiring manager. It was asynchronous, so we didn’t have to dance around finding a meeting time that worked for everyone. It self-filtered a lot of candidates who didn’t really want the job or who were uncomfortable with zoom/videoconferencing technology (a requirement for this job). It was very apparent who prepped and who didn’t. It was an easy “no thanks” filter when they submitted recordings of themselves, with no time constraints mind you, wearing totally work inappropriate clothes with filthy backgrounds and an unprofessional attitude. That’s the one that got me the most: the tool gave unlimited time to prep, unlimited time to record, and unlimited number of reattempts. Yet I still got a person wearing workout clothes, unkempt hair, shelves of undresses dolls in the background, and a stunning lack of understanding over an easily websearchable question. It saved hours of time between HR and the interview panel to just say “thanks, no thanks” off the submitted video.
I see AI-based filtering of candidates turning out the same. The people who get it and know how to write a resume and interview will be fine. The people who already struggle will struggle more.
Edit: phew, sometimes I forget what the average reddit/Lemmy user is like. People, none of this is a personal critique nor demand of you. If you don’t like F50 or Big Tech corporate culture, peace, don’t engage in it. If you don’t want to work for a company that leans on automation to filter through literally tens of thousands of applications a day, then don’t. You don’t have to participate in any of this.
You all have an amazingly optimistic expectation for the quality of candidates big companies get when applying is as simple as an applicant clicking once to submjt to hundreds of jobs. I am sure each of you individually is the best performer at your respective job, even though you wear pajamas half the time. Sadly, I don’t get to hire any of you.
I tried one of these video screening interviews once. It’s very unfriendly to the neuro-atypical. Gave up about halfway through, because I was on the verge of a stress-induced panic attack and figured the job wasn’t worth it with this kind of hoop to apply.
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Your company requiring video submissions for a fucking application is the easiest “this company is batshit insane and there’s no possibility working for them could ever be worth it” red flag I’ve ever seen.
Yep. I literally told a company there was no legitimate legal reason they could possibly want this, and good luck with their search. What better way to practice racism, sexism, and ageism in the hiring process?
Legal?
I get that some people would decline, sure. But what do you think is illegal about it?
What legal reason(s) do you have for needing to see their appearance when making a decision on whether to hire them? You may have some, such as requiring a professional appearance. These need to be spelled out in the job requirements. It also opens the doors to claims of illegal discrimination, since this will be on full display. In the US, that includes race, age, and gender. Having a required video can also reveal protected classes like familial status and religion, depending on what’s in the background.
Whether an action is “Legal” is almost always dependent on context, and the lawyers/courts involved. A common tactic by racist nightclubs is to set a dress code, particularly on shoes. The argument is they aren’t refusing entry based on race, but on clothing. But the unauthorized shoes are the ones commonly worn by people of the race they’re discriminating against. Different courts have made different rulings on whether this (and similar actions) constitute racial discrimination.
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I dunno what country you’re in, but in my country you are required by law to have a valid reason to reject a job candidate. That reason can be pretty simple, such as “your application was not as strong as other candidates” but you need to be able to back that claim up if you’re challenged (and you can be challenged on it).
The recommended approach is to have a list of selection criteria, and carefully consider each one then write it down and keep a record of the decision for a while, incase you end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Candidates have the right to ask why they were unsuccessful (and they should ask - to find out what they can do better to improve their chances next time. As a hiring manager I would note down anyone who asks and consider offering them a job in the future, bypassing the normal recruitment process).
I rank each criteria from one to ten, then disregard the worst scoring candidates until I have a short list that I can compare directly (at that point, I wouldn’t worry too much about numbers. You are allowed to say “you were a great candidate, but we had multiple great candidates and had to pick one. Sorry”.
If your selection criteria includes “they need to wear nice clothes” then you’re treading on very dangerous territory and could be breaking the law. The damages here are commonly six months pay at the salary of the position they applied for, and can also include a court order for you not to be involved in the hiring process going forward.
It’s perfectly reasonable to require someone to dress well if they have a customer facing role… but that requirement should be implemented at work and not during the job interview. I’m well aware that a lot of hiring managers rely heavily on these things to make their decision but they should not be doing that. It’s not as bad as picking someone because they’re a straight white male candidate (which is also very common), but it’s still a bad policy.
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Please tell me the country where declining to offer that candidate a job would be illegal.
Australia. It’s not clearly illegal but it’s dangerous territory. Candidates have a general right to be treated as equals and you need to reject someone for reasons that are relevant to the job position.
Something that can easily be changed, like a shirt, might not be OK. ANZ bank (a massive bank with several hundred billion dollars in assets they manage), for example, requires customer facing staff to wear a branded uniform but back at the office? You can wear whatever you want. When they changed their dress code years ago to no-longer require a suit/tie the CEO deliberately wore ugly clothes for a while to set an example.
Obviously no candidates are expected to turn up to an interview in their uniform - they don’t have a uniform yet. And if someone can wear a Marilyn Manson shirt in the office, then why not also at the interview?
The bank I’m with is even more relaxed - even customer facing staff can wear anything they want. Sure, if it’s offensive they’ll be told to wear something else, but that’s a conversation I’d be having with the candidate rather than a reason to reject their application. I might reject them if I don’t like their response.
I get weeding out the people who answer the question incorrectly.
You seem to place a lot of emphasis on appearance though which is shitty. Hopefully AI will help with that sort of bias as it’s pretty irrelevant. I get if you’re a boomer that appearance is important, but its also the easiest thing to change. If you pass all the other criteria appearance shouldn’t matter as you can easily just buy a suit/comb your hair.
Commenting on the title alone: I thought they were doing that already since the beginning. I don’t say that just as someone who’s bitter about never being called even for a fucking face-to-face interview, but because I’ve seen people who actually are great at their work never getting any returns on their applications.
This. I’m lucky if I get an email saying I didn’t get the job.
Another thing I hate: those “personality tests”. Given the option, most of my answers to those questions would be “it depends on the situation”. (After all, there are several different variables to consider, variables that the scenarios those “tests” they give us don’t cover, that I would actually need to consider if I were in the situation described in the scenario.) But that’s not an option, so I’m forced to pick something that I don’t really believe is right.
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