AI Is A Bigot When It Comes To Hiring

Increasingly, who gets interviewed for what job is determined by algorithm. Before your resume is seen, or even glanced it, by a human, it is first vetted by some mechanized system. The problem? Algorithms are not people, they are not particularly flexible, and they may...according to some observers...be biased.

There’s an interesting article on this very topic in a recent issue of Business Insider, “Here's why an AI expert says job recruiting sites promote employment discrimination” by Tyler Sonnemaker. In it, Sonnemaker interviews data science consultant Cathy O'Neil and she says that “discrimination in hiring starts with job advertising sites like LinkedIn, Monster.com, Facebook, and ZipRecruiter.”

In particular, she notes, job advertising sites are looking chiefly at demographic data. That means that people who fall out of fairly narrow confines of age and ethnic group may be rejected out of hand.

Now, full disclosure follows. I have myself -- I think-- been subjected to just exactly such automated bias. I’m a white male, so I’m privileged, but I’m also over sixty years old, and my background is rather odd--I’ve got multiple liberal arts degrees but my job experience is in journalism. This is kind of hard to explain when you’re filling out little forms online.

So, while I can’t prove it, I think I have been rejected for jobs by algorithms which took one look at my age and another at my tangled employment history, and just deleted my application without ever passing it to an actual human.

This is not a good thing, I think, and not just for me. Corporations need to let real people decide who they want to hire and work with, and to make hiring decisions based on human interactions.

Otherwise they may miss important talents, while rushing forward to hire only the most bland, the most processed, and the most mediocre employees.

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



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