
A new obstacle to landing a job after college: getting approved by AI - TuringNYC
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/15/tech/ai-job-interview/index.html
======
danpalmer
My brother has just finished a masters programme and is starting to apply for
jobs, he's coming up against a lot of these.

He's smart, motivated, very hard working, and has the necessary credentials on
his CV, but when talking to him he's quite monotone and low energy. Because of
this, he's failing these automated video interviews as he looks like he's not
a "team player" or "personable".

While interviewing practice is becoming more aware of bias against things like
this, the training data for these "AI" systems are going to be based on those
interviews conducted in the past, often with questionable outcomes. The
software is sold as helping "remove bias", but it instead pulls interview bias
forwards in more extreme ways to the CV-review stage, preventing candidates
from ever getting in front of a human.

While multiple humans on a hiring team may overcome some of their biases
working together, a single piece of software trained to look for stereotypes
will exacerbate those biases.

~~~
52-6F-62
I had never heard of these video interview analysis methods prior to this
thread.

I think it’s at the very least way too early to rely on this and at the worst
just... terrible.

AST’s are already notoriously bad and this is just a whole new level of just
plain bad. Time is precious, sure, but so are human relationships if time
means anything.

It’s like nuance was completely disregarded in the pursuit of corporate
contracts.

~~~
danpalmer
They do sound terrible and I hope to never encounter one, but my brother made
a good point: the NHS get something like 12k applications per week, they have
an average of 25k job openings each month. They apparently can't deal with
that manually, which does make some sense.

I personally think they _should_ handle it manually, and if the system breaks
we should fix it in another way because this way sucks, but I'm not sure what
that would be. More consultancies or temp agencies? Not sure that's a better
option.

~~~
iamleppert
If a company isn’t willing or able to commit the appropriate resources to
hiring, they should reduce their number of open positions, not look to
technology to solve a self-created problem.

Assuming they don’t have the resources to give people a proper interview and
vet a candidate, can you imagine the situation once those that do pass
actually encounter on the job? I’d never work at a place that makes such kinds
of decisions and it’s a good signal that the culture at the top of the company
is completely broken.

Any company using one of these AI systems to combat attrition or justify
growth is for sure a dumpster fire.

~~~
tartoran
I agree. The AI hype helps with drinking their koolaids and let's hope this
will cease soon. I'm not saying that there aren't good problems to solve with
AI, but adopting it so readily on people while it is not working properly and
while it is amounts to experimenting on people which is a terrible thing to
do. I'm not for the AI winter but for the the end of AI hype.

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JoeAltmaier
I consult. When its remote, I sometimes recommend we have a person on the
ground (at the customer plant) to coordinate and manage data. If they don't
agree, I hire a graduate anyway and ask that a place be made in their office
for them. Ultimately the client find them useful and they get hired on,
because the client actually did need somebody to be expert in the new
software.

It's a responsibility to help young graduates find an entry to a company. All
it takes is that first entry.

~~~
existencebox
Question for you. How do you find good fit for graduates in your niche/good
candidates for the role?

My experience consulting was that the spectrum of work I could be asked to do
was so broad I'd have trouble, despite having a handful of junior engineer
friends, feeling confident I could hand off work to them; let alone a graduate
with enough locality to be onsite. (and despite wanting to, as well, I'd love
to give them those opportunities while selfishly allowing myself to scale
further)

I'm not sure whether this is a problem due to lack of specialization on my
part ("big data/distributed system design"), or lack of finding properly
aligned graduates; I'd love your take on building those connections.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sure. It generally goes like this: they think they want another Engineer, but
what they/I need on site is a project coordinator/manager type. That's where
they drag their heels on hiring somebody.

So I hire a Journalism or Business graduate, give them mentoring for the first
month on-site, and being young and ambition they take off.

The principle thing in dealing with an Engineering organization (I tell them)
is, when you don't understand what they're saying, say "I don't understand
that. Can you elaborate?" Engineers generally love to explain their stuff. And
it doesn't hurt to appear humble and eager either.

Anyway it works for what I've been doing (data migration, engineering data
management, test fixture setup and deployment) since its more software
configuration and vendor selection than it is technical Engineering. More a
planning and coordination role. Especially since the departments I get
injected into are already busy, and are glad to offload non-Engineering tasks.

It's a situation that's rich with opportunities to make yourself legitimately
useful and productive. So the right candidate is not chosen so much by
credentials, as skills in organizing, communicating and following up.

One very successful example had been a manager for an Americorp section,
looking after 20+ young people as young as himself, and keeping them
motiviated, supplied and supported. This person is now being groomed for a
higher-level management position in the service company I introduced him into.
I expect to see him as a Director or VP one day.

Btw, it doesn't hurt to have somebody at client companies that feels
predisposed to look favorably on my services. Not only can I continue to get
connected to whomever it takes to get a contract moving, I have a positive
voice in their meeting rooms supporting us.

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john_moscow
While I agree that using AI to rank the candidates based on their responses to
pre-recorded videos is dystopian, I would like to point out that it only works
in the environments where:

a) The supply of candidates greatly outweighs demand.

b) There is no clear way to assess the individual candidate's impact on the
business' ability to make money, and the employees are essentially
commoditized.

These environments have been known to be toxic for a while: filtering people
based on bullshit 20-page personality questionnaires, managers hiring the most
desperate ones who would tolerate the most humiliation from them, while every
part of the process trying to a wink-wink nudge-nudge to others in order to
land their nephew on a cushy position.

While AI definitely starts another round in the battle, I would advise anyone
who's sick of this bullshit to focus on the economic output of their
prospective position. If a company is looking for an AI engineer that can
halve the size of their inference model without losing more than 1% of
accuracy, they won't waste time scoring your story about your weak sides. They
will look at your thesis and hire you if you already did something similar.
The problem is that most of the jobs these days are about sitting quiet in a
friendly team and smiling when the CEO shows off the team to the next round of
potential investors. But those jobs won't give you much growth, and will end
your career once you don't look young and cool anymore.

~~~
bsenftner
"I would like to point out that it only works in the environments where"

No, it does not work at all. It is fraud, and needs to be treated as a
criminal enterprise.

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jimbob45
This has got to be a fake. The only way AI would be able to make any sort of
correct judgment about someone's probable future performance is if it had some
training set of data of employees who had their interviews recorded and who
were known to be bad in some way. However, it's still a massive leap in logic
to be able to correlate anything an AI could observe to some tangibly bad
behavior later on.

I'm thinking the promises of this technology will never be realized.

~~~
stopads
Google and other large tech giants have been working on precisely that sort of
AI with those types of data for at least 10 years now. They are famous for
tinkering with their hiring process based on mountains of data, with mostly
bad results.

Which aspect do you find farfetched?

~~~
xiphias2
At Google machine learning was was always used for vetting the 100k+
applications per year that the HR team just doesn't have time to go through.

The main goal was to filter people who have the biggest chance to go through
the human interviews later in the process.

The only reason why it's called ,,AI'' now is because it's trendy. It can be
just a simple linear model that takes education (University) and GPA score
into account.

The simplest way to skip these filters is to get a reference from a person who
already works at the company.

~~~
chrisseaton
I wonder why ultra-elite companies like Google don't swap to a model where
they reach out to people they want to hire, rather than accepting random
applications?

~~~
thaumasiotes
They do reach out to people they want to urge to apply; the set of people they
"want to hire" is pretty small.

~~~
glandium
They reach out to people, but those people end up in the same bucket as
everyone else.

------
drongoking
Whenever I see AI used for something like this, right after thinking "our
dystopia is here," I wonder how it could be gamed. An experienced interviewer
can tell when they're being told what they want to hear; I suspect an AI could
not. The AI ends up rewarding preparation and acting skills. And when you make
too many hoops for people to jump through, eventually you find you're just
selecting for those who are good at hoop-jumping.

~~~
randycupertino
I also think you're self-selecting for desperate people who couldn't get jobs
elsewhere, as most in-demand candidates would not put up with this nonsense. I
know when I was looking, anywhere that had one of those 100-question inane
personality tests ("Would you rather lead a meeting, or go skydiving?") etc I
would bow out of the application process.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
On the other hand, consider the position that had a 100-question personality
test was never intended for a competitive candidate like you. It was
intentionally crafted for the desperate job seeker who might take a lower
wage.

------
blakesterz
Maybe an even better headline would be

"A new obstacle to landing a job: getting approved by AI"

Doesn't this same problem exist for anyone finding a job? It's probably even
worse when you're looking and your 40 or 50 and even worse if you're changing
careers. I'd bet AI drops anyone over the age of 40, almost certainly 50.

I'm not saying "these darn kids have it so easy today" I'm sure it's not, but
my 1/2 educated guess is that the older you get the harder it gets to make it
past these algorithms.

~~~
rayhendricks
If they did that would be insta-lawsuit.
[https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm](https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm)

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bencollier49
Most probably unusable in the UK, as the AI won't be able to explain why it
rejected a candidate ("why did you score them low for team working?") and the
candidate will take the employer to the cleaners. God only knows what hidden
variables it'll start discovering and exploiting. My guess is it'll reinforce
well-known prejudices.

~~~
retrac
I'm quite hard of hearing. I wonder what the algorithm's analysis of "facial
expressions and the tonality of the job applicant's voice" would supposedly
reveal about me.

Probably something actionable under the nondiscrimination laws here,
thankfully.

~~~
bencollier49
"I didn't like the look of him" certainly isn't an acceptable answer, and it's
literally the answer in this case, always.

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jimthrow
The vast oversupply of talent has gotten so large employers can’t even be
bothered to read resumes anymore: Ai will. This is what happens when ever
larger percentage of society gets more and more degrees

~~~
rapind
If there's an oversupply of talent in tech then are H1Bs no longer being
awarded?

Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting
stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent.

I'm honestly curious how both can be true. Who's lying, or is it simply
unwillingness to train local talent?

~~~
theevilsharpie
> Seems like a constant gripe about talent shortages but then conflicting
> stories about how to filter an overwhelming supply of talent.

> I'm honestly curious how both can be true.

There's an overwhelming number of applicants. That says nothing about their
qualifications.

I don't know what Big Tech's numbers look like, but when I did hiring, the
percentage of applicants that were even remotely qualified was usually in the
single digits.

~~~
rapind
Sounds like an education/ training problem then?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
There's a certain amount of innate talent involved in any profession, so
additional training and education is unlikely to help. No amount of education
or training would ever turn me into a professionally successful artist, for
example.

------
jacobwilliamroy
I think job applicants should have to compete with eachother in a craps
tournament. Losers are knocked out of the pool until the number of applicants
matches the number of open positions. I also think this is how we should
choose the president.

~~~
perl4ever
There's an old joke that the first cut is or should be made by randomly
throwing away a subset of applications, because you don't want to hire someone
who is unlucky.

~~~
perl4ever
But seriously, I think it _is_ probably a good idea, if you have to throw out
90% of applications to start, to do it randomly if the alternative is a
dubious statistical or ML-derived model. It would make me feel better from the
point of view of hiring or as a candidate, not to have the risk of an
unforeseen undesirable bias.

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Mountain_Skies
This is why I am very skeptical when companies, especially tech companies, go
running to Congress wanting more imported labor. They're ignoring qualified
applicants left and right due to processes that are optimized to minimize the
risk of ever making a bad hire even though it filters out lots of good hires.
Fix your process before expecting laws to be changed to ameliorate the
negatives of the process you chose.

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FpUser
I am thinking at what point all those "business innovations" will turn
democracy and freedom into a corporate gulag. What's the point of having so
called free and democratic government system if you'd be back to USSR 5 days a
week from 9 to 5.

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bsenftner
Pure fraudulent AI snake oil. Where is a hungry lawyer that wants to team up
with computer scientists and take down these predator companies. There is
serious wealth to be had by exposing these con men, and a hell of a lot of
misery to be halted.

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idclip
That sweet, sweet dystopia.

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code4tee
The flip side is that top talent won’t want to put up with the BS so a lot of
these companies end up shooting themselves in the foot to save a few bucks on
recruiting.

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drngdds
Revolutionizing hiring bias with the power of deep learning!

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nitwit005
Just seems like a way to lose a lawsuit. All you need is some handicapped
client the system can't understand, or a demonstration that it's biased
against an accent, and that's all it'll take.

~~~
dpflan
The customer could blame the service provider - especially when the provider
stresses how unbiased they aim to be. But then negligence by the customer is
an issue too. I agree with you — bias in ML systems exists and applying it to
more facets of life is tricky and snake-oil can be tasty, but this does also
surface issues that require standards and assessments of bias.

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trashface
It seems like small companies using this will probably fail. They will hire
batches of AI-approved, but actually bad candidates. Or they will go long
periods without being able to hire for core positions because they "can't find
anyone". Both eventually result in the company going out of business.

But government or big companies, well, its just bad news there, since they
can't fail. They will just get more incompetent.

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sticky_thrrwwwy
I tried to apply for a in-between job at a large outdoor store. They wanted me
to use the HireVue software. Unfortunately, there was no way to appeal; the
email link they sent was one of those "noreply@contractcompany.com" deals.

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chayesfss
I’ve thought for years a SaaS app could be created that elevates a prospects
chances of a call. I’d have to hire folks to work alg but we could take their
resume and apply to job with a very high score

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t34543
Uh, what kind of companies are using AI to screen candidates?

~~~
cocire
literally all of them? I guess we can pretend that Applicant Tracking Systems
(ATS) that scrape resumes for keyword matches aren't some specific definition
of "AI" if we want to be naive though

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djokkataja
It doesn't make sense to evaluate someone's abilities to interact with other
people based on how they talk to a camera while alone.

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novok
This is a modern version of those personality surveys that low rent jobs would
give to potential employees.

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thewileyone
Soon it would just be via a blood test, like Gattaca.

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acd
In europe it may not be legal to use AI based decision making. According to
article 22 of GDPR.

"Automated individual decision-making, including profiling" [https://gdpr-
info.eu/art-22-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/)

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modzu
the fear mongering in here is interesting. "secret, unproven" algorithms (much
less intelligent than anything developed with machine learning) already
control an individuals access to all sorts of things, like college, credit,
insurance, etc. there is a positive side to approaching this problem and more
humans is never going to be it.

~~~
empath75
Credit ratings aren’t secret.

~~~
modzu
no, the models that generate the scores are.

