Listening to a tech podcast talk about AI hiring tools left me with big doubts

I mean, they were going on about how AI can scan resumes faster and pick the best candidates without bias. Idk, that sounds great in theory, right? Like, it could help companies find talent they might miss and cut down on human prejudice. But then I remembered reading how these systems sometimes learn from old hiring data that favored certain schools or names. So if the past was unfair, the AI just copies that and might filter out good people for dumb reasons. It feels weird to trust a machine with someone's job chances when it might have hidden flaws. Maybe there's a way to train it better or have people double-check, but that seems like extra work. I'm honestly not sure if this tech helps or hurts more. What's your take on using AI for hiring?

4 comments

4 Comments

price.ray1mo ago

That Amazon resume scanner is a perfect example. They built a robot to remove human bias, and it just got a PhD in being sexist. Real efficient way to make old problems run on new software.

the_john1mo ago

Yeah no, I heard about that Amazon resume scanner they had to scrap. It taught itself to downgrade resumes with words like "women's" in them, like from a women's chess club or something. Classic case of garbage in, garbage out. If you train it on old biased decisions, it just gets really good at being biased.

emma_campbell101mo ago

Ever hear about those AI tools that judge people by their face on video interviews? I read one was tossing out candidates for bad "eye contact" but it was really just thrown off by glasses or darker skin tones. So we're just making new, tech flavored bias instead of fixing the old kind. How is a black box algorithm supposed to catch the spark in someone who took a weird path to get skills. Feels like we're racing to use a broken tool because it's fast, not because it's fair.

blake79228d ago

People get too worked up about this stuff... it's just software being tuned. They'll fix the glasses thing in an update. These tools are meant to sort through a huge pile of apps fast, not be perfect. A human hiring manager has biases too, they just hide them better. The goal is to save time on the first cut, not replace every interview.