AI-infused hiring programs have drawn scrutiny, most notably over whether they end up exhibiting biases based on the data they’re trained on.

AI-infused hiring programs have drawn scrutiny, most notably over whether they end up exhibiting biases based on the data they’re trained on.

  • @PlothunterEnglish
    11•1 year ago

    The so-called AI parses your resume looking for keywords that match the job description. They anonymize and provide a summary. I don’t think there is much room for bias. Maybe if you use crappie software that doesn’t make the summary anonymous.

    BTW write your resume for the algorithm not the manager.

    • @vinniepEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      AI resume screeners are very much at risk of bias. There have been stories about exactly this in years past. The ML models need to be trained, so they get fed resumes of candidates that were hired and not hired so the model can learn to differentiate the two and make decisions on new resumes in the future. That training, though, takes any bias that went into previous decisions and brings it forward.

      From the Amazon I linked above, the model was prioritizing white men over women and people of color. When you think back to how these models were trained, though, that’s exactly what you’d expect to happen. No one was intentionally introducing bias to the AI process, but software teams have historically been very male and white, and when referrals and references come into play, those demographics were further emphasized. And then let’s not pretend that none of those recruiters or hiring managers were bringing their own bias to the table.

      If you feed that into your model as it’s training data, of course the model is going to continue to favor white men, not because it’s actually looking for men, but because resumes that men typically submit are the kinds that get hired. Then they found that resumes that mention a professional women’s organization or historically black or women only colleges were typically not hired. The model isn’t “thinking” about why that is - it just knows that when certain traits exist, the resume is ranked lower, so it replicates that.

      Building a truly unbiased AI system is actually incredibly difficult, not the least due to the fact that the demographics of the data scientists working on these systems are themselves predominantly male and white themselves. We’ve also seen this issue in the past with other AI systems, including facial recognition systems, where these systems built by teams of white men can’t seem to make reliable determinations when looking at a picture of a black woman (with accuracy rates 20-30% lower for black woman compared to white men).