'Dehumanising, impenetrable, frustrating': the grim reality of job hunting in the age of AI.

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The automation revolution has hit recruitment, with everything from facial expressions to vocal tone now analysed by algorithms and artificial intelligence. But what’s the cost to workforce diversity – and workers themselves?

The “pre-hire assessment” market is estimated to be worth £2.14b a year. Photograph: Gearstd/Getty Images/iStockphoto
▼ According to Nathan Mondragon, finding the right employee is all about looking at the little things. Tens of thousands of little things, as it turns out. Mondragon is the head psychologist at Hirevue, a company that offers software that screens job candidates using algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI). Hirevue’s flagship product, used by global giants such as Unilever and Goldman Sachs, asks candidates to answer standard interview questions in front of a camera. Meanwhile its software, like a team of hawk-eyed psychologists hiding behind a mirror, makes note of thousands of barely perceptible changes in posture, facial expression, vocal tone and word choice.
“We break the answers people give down into many thousands of data points, into verbal and non-verbal cues,” says Mondragon. “If you’re answering a question about how you would spend a million dollars, your eyes would tend to shift upward, your verbal cues would go silent, or turn to ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’. Your head would tilt slightly upward with your eyes. The facial movement analytics would tell us you were going into a creative thinking style.”
The program turns this data into a score, which is then compared against one the program has already “learned” from top-performing employees. The idea is that a good prospective employee looks a lot like a good current employee, just not in any way a human interviewer would notice.
It sounds far fetched. Approaches like vocal analysis and reading “microexpressions” have previously been applied in policing and intelligence with little clear success. But Mondragon says their automated analyses line up favourably with established tests of personality and ability, and that customers report better employee performance and less turnover.It’s a bit dehumanising, never being able to get through to an employer
Robert, plumber
Hirevue is just one of a slew of new companies selling AI as a replacement for the costly human side of hiring. Bath-based Cognisses specialises in games that predict various aptitudes (“personality is hard to gamify, but we’re working on it,” Boris Altemeyer, their head of technology, told me.) San Francisco’s Mya Systems offers a reactive, AI-powered chatbot that will conduct the entire interview process. Hirevue estimates the “pre-hire assessment” market is worth £2.14bn (US$3 billion) a year. According to Doug Rode, senior managing director at recruiter Michael Page, the past year has seen a marked increase in companies aggressively selling AI packages of widely variable quality.
A study last year by the  Chartered Institute of Personnel  and Developmentfound an average of 24 applicants for an average low wage job. Tesco, the UK’s largest private employer, received well over  three million job applicationsin 2016. As the number of people applying for jobs has increased, employers have removed human beings from the hiring side whenever possible, automating more and more of the decisions in the process. This started over a decade ago with simple programs that scanned text CVs for keywords about education, skills and past employers in order to flag them for recruiters. It has expanded to include a bewildering range of quizzes, psychometric tests and custom built games that can be used to reject applicants before a human ever sees their application.
This shift has already radically changed the way that many people interact with prospective employers. The standardised CV format allowed jobseekers to be evaluated by multiple firms with a single approach. Now jobseekers are forced to prepare for whatever format the company has chosen. The burden has been shifted from employer to jobseeker – a familiar feature of the gig economy era–and along with it the ability of jobseekers to get feedback or insight into the decision-making process. The role of human interaction in hiring has decreased, making an already difficult process deeply alienating.
Beyond the often bewildering and dehumanising experience lurk the concerns that attend automation and AI, which draws on data that’s often been shaped by inequality. If you suspect you’ve been discriminated against by an algorithm, what recourse do you have? How prone are those formulas to bias, and how do the multitude of third-party companies that develop and license this software deal with the personal data of applicants? And is it inevitable that non-traditional or poorer candidates, or those who struggle with new technology, will be excluded from the process? (▪ ▪ ▪)

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