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.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      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”.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • frunch@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          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!

          • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Two categories of issues at play here:

            1. 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.

            2. 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.

  • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.org
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    9 months ago

    I hate how quickly “AI” has been adopted for tasks it is wholly incapable of doing well, merely fast.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        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.

      • greenskye@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        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.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • smackjack@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • erwan@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      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.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • greenskye@lemm.ee
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      9 months 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.

    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Every service is getting shittier with AI. They all suck. Hell, even autocorrect is worse.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        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.

      • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        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.

  • oakey66@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

      • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Same, it’s a stupid ge and I’m sick of playing it. Something will have to give eventually.

    • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            9 months ago

            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.

      • oakey66@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

  • The Pantser@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

      • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        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.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      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.”

  • Veedem@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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…

        • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          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.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      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

  • Ænima@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    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.