Algorithmic recruitment and Bias

Trust thought for today - The bizarre world of Recruitment Tech. Swotting for Wednesday talk at London Tech Week and another project on tech development which involves engaging stakeholders by potential impact to find out what might go wrong.

Here is surveillance tech for the workplace. Appreciate that some companies get lots of CVs and real people can be biased and bored and may not do a great job either from time to time. But these problems are obvious and could have thought them through properly.

FYI ¾ of cvs will be pre-screened by algorithms. 88% of CEOs know that the tech rejects qualified candidates.

1. The tech perpetuates old biases eg kicks out women & minority CVs - don't put 'women's chess club' etc on your cv

2. If you have a gap in your cv more than 6 months, it weights this more than your experience and you are automatically knocked out

3. If they put too many criteria they get people who are average on all, not great at everything but poor at one which may not be that significant

4. If you are called Thomas and mention Church, this helps alot.

How to succeed:
They tell you how to fill in your cv to get through the algorithm, which is basically:

- be boring, try not to stand out, use a basic template, and don't have any quirky ideas about how you might catch the eye of the recruiter (they don't want people like you with all that initiative and subversive creativity!)

- use lots of their key words in the description in your resume

- make sure you say you can use Microsoft Office even if it isn't in the description.

I can imagine that this is a good idea in theory. I suppose will never know how many CVs were binned because they had the name of someone's ex girlfriend, or because the recruiter hates Chelsea supporters, or because there were too many to do in the time allocated and most were randomly binned. But it doesn't look that great in practice. And being rejected by a machine feels much less respectful and MUCH more infuriating than being rejected by a person.

Also well done Martin Burch who sued Bloomberg and got £8k because of their useless software!

Article found here