Want a job? Employers say: Speak to the computer
A day after her interview for a part-time job at Target last year, Dana Anthony got a contact informing her she didn't make the cut.
Anthony didn't know why - a predicament common to most job seekers at one point or another. But she also had no sense at all of how the interview had opted, because her interviewer was a computer.
More job-seekers, including some professionals, may soon need to accept impersonal online interviews where they never speak to another human being, or know if behind-the-scenes artificial-intelligence systems are influencing hiring decisions. Demand for online hiring services, which interview job people remotely via notebook computer or phone, mushroomed through the COVID-19 pandemic and remains high amid a perceived worker shortage as the economy opens back up.
These systems claim to save lots of employers money, sidestep hidden biases that may influence human recruiters and expand the range of potential candidates. Many now also use AI to determine prospect skills by analyzing what they state.
Anthony likes to look an interviewer in the eyes, but all she could see was her own face reflected in the screen. “I interview better personally because I’m in a position to develop a reference to the individual,” she said.
But professionals question whether machines can accurately and fairly judge a person’s character traits and emotional signals. Algorithms tasked to understand who's the best fit for employment can entrench bias if they are taking cues from industries where racial and gender disparities already are prevalent.
So when a computer screens out some candidates and elevates others without explanation, it's harder to know whether it's making fair assessments. Anthony, for instance, couldn't help wondering if her identity as a Black woman afflicted the decision.
“If you apply for a job and so are rejected because of a biased algorithm, you won’t know,” said Oxford University researcher Aislinn Kelly-Lyth. In a face-to-face interview, in comparison, a job seeker might grab discriminatory cues from the interviewer, she said.
New rules proposed by the European Union would subject such AI hiring systems to tighter regulation. Advocates have pushed for similar measures in the U.S.
Among the leading companies in the field, Utah-based HireVue, gained notoriety in recent years through the use of AI technology to assess cognitive ability from an applicant's facial expressions through the interview. After heated criticism devoted to the scientific validity of these claims and the prospect of racial or gender bias, the business announced earlier this year it would end the practice.
But its AI-based assessments, which rank the abilities and personalities of people to flag the most promising for further review, still consider speech and word choices in its decisions.
The privately owned company helped create a market for “on-demand” video interviews. Its known customers have included retailers like Target and Ikea, major tech companies like Amazon, banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, oil giants, restaurant chains, supermarkets, airlines, cruise lines and school districts. The Associated Press reached out to varied brand-name employers that utilize the technology; most declined to discuss it.
HireVue CEO Kevin Parker says the business has worked hard to ensure its technology won't discriminate predicated on factors such as race, gender or regional accents. Its systems, which translate speech to text and sift for clues about team orientation, adaptability, dependability and other job skills, can outperform human interviewers, he said.
“What we’re trying to replace is people’s gut instinct,” he said in - naturally - a video interview.
HireVue says it interviewed more than 5.6 million people all over the world in 2020. Supermarket chains used it to screen a large number of people a day amid a pandemic-fueled hiring surge for cashiers, stockers and delivery crews, Parker said.
Providers of broader hiring-focused software such as for example Modern Hire and Outmatch have started offering their own video interviews and AI assessment tools. On its website, Outmatch touts its capability to measure "the must-have soft skills your individuals and employees need to succeed.”
HireVue notes that a lot of customers don't actually utilize the company's AI-based assessments. Atlanta's school district, for instance, has used HireVue since 2014, but says it depends on 50 human recruiters to score recorded interviews. Target said the pandemic led it to displace in-person interviews with HireVue interviews, but the retail giant told the AP it relies on its employees - not HireVue's algorithms - to view and evaluate prerecorded videos.
None of this was clear to Anthony when she sat down before a screen to interview for a seasonal job last year. She dressed for the occasion and settled right into a comfortable spot. The only hint of a human occurrence came in a prerecorded introduction that laid out what to expect - noting, for example, that she could delete a remedy and start over.
But she had no way to know what type of impression she was creating. “We’re unable to provide specific feedback relating to your candidacy,” Target's rejection email said. She was rejected again after completing a HireVue interview for a different job in December.
“I understand companies or organizations trying to be more mindful of the time and the finances they spend with regards to recruitment,” said Anthony, who obtained a master's degree in strategic communications last year at the University of NEW YORK at Chapel Hill. Still, the one-way interviews left her uneasy about who, or what, was evaluating her.
That inscrutability poses one of the biggest concerns about the rapid growth of complex algorithms in recruitment and hiring, Kelly-Lyth said.
In one infamous example, Amazon developed a resume-scanning tool to recruit top talent, but abandoned it after finding it favored men for technical roles - partly since it was comparing job prospects against the company's own male-dominated tech workforce. A report released in April discovered that Facebook shows different job ads to women and men in a way that might violate anti-discrimination laws.
Governments over the U.S. and Europe are considering possible checks on these hiring tools, including requirements for outside audits to ensure they don't really discriminate against women, minorities or persons with disabilities. The proposed EU rules, unveiled in April, would force providers of AI systems that screen or evaluate job candidates to meet new requirements for accuracy, transparency and accountability.
HireVue has begun phasing out its face-scanning tool, which analyzed expressions and eye movements and faced derision by academics as “pseudoscience” similar to the discredited and racist 19th century theory of phrenology. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint in 2019 with the Federal Trade Commission, citing a HireVue executive who had said 10% to 30% of a candidate’s score was predicated on facial expressions.
“The value it had been adding linked to the controversy it had been creating wasn’t quite definitely,” Parker told the AP.
HireVue also released portions of a third-party audit that examined fairness and bias issues around its automated tools. A published summary recommended minor changes such as for example modifying the weight directed at the especially short answers disproportionately supplied by minority candidates.
Critics welcomed the audit but said it had been merely a start.
“I don’t think the science really supports the idea that speech patterns will be a meaningful assessment of someone’s personality,” said Sarah Myers West of New York University’s AI Now Institute, which studies the social implications of AI. For example, she said, such systems have historically had trouble understanding women's voices.
Kian Betancourt, a 26-year-old who's pursuing a doctorate in organizational psychology at Hofstra University, also failed a remote HireVue interview for a consulting position earlier this season. He acknowledged that he could have tried too hard to predict the way the system would evaluate him for a consultancy job, tailoring his diction to include keywords he thought might boost his score.
While Betancourt is supportive of “structured interviews” involving a standard group of questions, he's bothered by the opacity of automated systems.
“Tell people accurately how we’re being evaluated, whether or not it’s something as simple as, ‘This is an AI interview'," he said. That basic information can affect how people promote themselves, he said.
Source: japantoday.com
