Ditch the recruitment bot, it’s not working

Algorithms are penalising exceptional candidates and, ultimately, the companies that miss out with hires of ill-suited staff sifted by AI.

The World Economic Forum has warned that companies have lost the human touch as more and more use digital screening, automated video interviews, and psychometric and aptitude tests, including critical reasoning and logic.

Everyone remembers their first job interview, the ensuing humiliations and setbacks. When I made it to the last round of the ITN news scheme, I was so nervous I poured the other three male candidates tea and asked if they wanted biscuits. In my feedback I was told I wasn’t assertive enough to be a journalist.

By the time I was interviewed by The Times, I had the confidence to walk into the editor’s office with coffee dripping down my shirt. Someone had spilled their breakfast brew down my front on the Tube and I turned it into an anecdote.

But at least my generation had interviews. Now, Gen Z are screened by artificial intelligence using CV scanners, automated video interviews and online computer games to sort candidates. It can take months to complete up to nine stages of a job, or even an internship, application. Potential recruits with AI-approved CVs might be asked to play an online personality game, or have to anxiously ask their flatmates to keep quiet as they tell a robot about their leadership qualities.

Platforms such as HireVue record applicants answering predetermined questions while algorithms assess them on key motivational phrases. “Get excited and share your energy with the camera,” HireVue says. But it’s hard when it’s your own face staring back. Only the most narcissistic enjoy telling themselves they are a fantastic team player.

According to the Institute of Student Employers, at least 28 per cent of companies are using digital screening and automated video interviews. Even more use psychometric and aptitude tests, including critical reasoning and logic. Now the World Economic Forum has warned that companies have lost the human touch.

Hilke Schellmann, the author of The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future and an assistant professor at New York University, says that the biggest risk software poses to jobs is not machines taking workers’ positions but AI preventing the best candidates from getting a role at all.

“One biased human hiring manager can harm a lot of people in a year,” she said, “but an algorithm at a large company could harm thousands of applicants.” It’s often the most exceptional or atypical candidates who seem to be penalised most harshly by AI for their unconventional answers.

The benefit for potential employees seems to be zero. AI doesn’t seem to make the process any faster. There is often no feedback or constructive criticism, no way of showing originality or humour. The upside for employers comes from the time saved in scrutinising endless CVs and conducting interviews.

With job adverts spread on LinkedIn and social media, many management consultancies, law and accountancy firms and finance companies often have 1000 applicants per position, while supermarkets, airlines and police forces can have hundreds. It’s easier and cheaper to weed candidates out using AI than hire more staff in HR.

Companies say AI is fairer and impervious to human bias but at some firms the AI screener is trained on CVs of employees already in the building, which can perpetuate prejudice. Others are heavily weighted towards marginalised groups and potential employees are rarely told the criteria against which they are being judged.

A human connection is crucial in most workplaces, but these firms are recruiting young people who have learnt corporate buzzwords and are fluent at talking to a screen. At best, AI could provide an additional layer of data-driven analysis that may provide insight but it should never replace a skilled, empathetic human.

Meanwhile recruits are gaming the system. Clever applicants realise they can match the company’s AI with cover letters honed by ChatGPT. Others get friends to complete their online maths tests.

Clever applicants can game the systems but many young jobseekers feel demoralised, dehumanised and exhausted by automated recruitment.

Many young people are filling out hundreds of applications a year, only to be rejected at 3am by a bot. At a restaurant in London, the graduate waiters have a dozen MAs between them and spend hours filling out job applications, but only one has found even a summer internship. “A Squid Game-style tournament would at least be fun,” says an Oxford engineering graduate with a first. Meanwhile some are paying tutors to coach them to beat the AI.

Research at the University of Sussex Business School in association with the Institute for Employment Studies shows that young jobseekers feel demoralised, dehumanised and exhausted by automated recruitment systems that appear incomprehensible. I asked a former civil servant of 30 years’ standing to test Whitehall’s fast-stream recruitment and he failed the practice test, unable to work out what they wanted with their online multiple-choice suitability assessment.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge published a paper last year on AI used to recruit people for jobs and boost workplace diversity, concluding this was an “automated pseudoscience”.

Screening software companies are not going to admit that their tools may not be 100 per cent fair, while companies using them can’t say they may be rogue in case they incur a class-action lawsuit.

But there is nothing more important than recruiting the right talent. Too late, companies are discovering they have hired ill-suited recruits. One chief executive admits that many of their graduates, sifted by AI, have the wrong skill set.

It’s easy to see why young people are becoming disheartened and are giving up. Students have been told by adults to work hard, pass their exams, look respectable, be polite, show resilience and they will find a job.

Now they realise none of this will make any difference if the bot doesn’t like you and perhaps they should have spent their teens playing computer games instead.

The Times