GabyArtificial intelligence tools are quietly and steadily replacing HR professionals. It turns out most of the world’s leading companies are already using algorithmic services. AI is taking on HR duties.
About 99 percent of the companies on the Fortune 500 list use smart technologies to review resumes, analyze interviews, and sometimes even make final hiring decisions.
Fortune 500 — an annually updated list of the largest U.S. corporations ranked by total revenue.
Without the human factor
Professor Hilke Shellmann from New York University describes in her book “Algorithm” how the hiring world is turning into a Wild West, where unregulated AI tools make decisions without human oversight.
Artificial intelligence decides whom to hire and whom to fire by monitoring people’s social media behavior, the tone of their voice, and their facial expressions during interviews, Hilke Shellmann told the Daily Mail.
Algorithms can tell management not only who to invite for an interview but also who should be promoted or dismissed. AI can even alert a manager if an employee appears likely to resign.
At the same time, the AI tools used for hiring are not always reliable. Company recruiters often don’t fully understand how these technologies work, and Professor Shellmann warned that using AI in HR is fraught with discriminatory risk.
An algorithm might form odd ideas about a candidate’s chances based on church attendance, nationality, or gender. Women and people with disabilities can face bias in hiring decisions. Affected candidates can’t respond because they don’t know why the AI made that decision.
“Companies that use such tools usually do not want to comment on it, as they fear damage to their reputations,” Shellmann said. That reluctance makes sense given that employers often do not even read the resumes of candidates who are rejected.
AI tools save companies money and ease recruiters’ workloads. But there is no guarantee that algorithms will choose the most qualified people.
Many companies use AI to analyze video interviews for a “wrong” tone, facial expressions, or movements that supposedly reveal emotions. But does that data reliably predict whether a person will perform well at work? In reality, Shellmann says, that information often doesn’t carry much weight.
She also said employers now regularly use AI to scan social media, hunting for supposedly important cues—like links to songs with violent lyrics—that can lead them to label candidates as violent and unhireable.
Robots seek to “look under the hood” of people
When companies use AI to infer personality from social posts, they’re trying to learn who a candidate really is. In other words, employers want to “look under the hood” before hiring, the professor said.
In the past, the only way to “look under the hood” might have been handwriting analysis. Now AI dissects candidates much more thoroughly.
But Shellmann points out that research suggests personality explains only about 5 percent of job success. That’s very little.
People adapt over time by working on themselves. For example, a shy person may push themselves to be more outgoing at a party or among colleagues. AI doesn’t pick up on those subtle personal changes.
