please listen to the podcast episode “Beating the AI Hiring Machines“ and discuss it.
1. Respond to the podcast (i.e. what were your thoughts, reactions, and/or questions?). Your engagement with the podcast in this first post must be at least 200 words in length.
2.Respond to one of the fellow student (i.e. what other thoughts, ideas, and/or questions did their post inspire?). This response must be at least 200 words in length.
(1) Regarding the podcast, I do have some thoughts on it. The “deepfake” voice immediately reminded me of the program 15.ai which provides text-to-speech for fictional characters. How much input would be required to have enough data to create effective speech synthesis of yourself? Although I can understand using an AI to scan résumés to scan for keywords and other basic tasks, I found it odd that an AI would be assigned to judge something as subjective as arbitrary as personality; it just seems like something that a computer is too rational and insular to properly measure. Having people trained to do interviews with AI is a perfectly reasonable activity that is likely to help them, but it seems to me that it would be more pertinent to bring AI closer to the level of a human interviewer before having said AI utilized in the hiring process in the major way that it is today. Call me a luddite, but I think humans are still the best at hiring other humans, and that trying to skimp on costs by having a computer handle the process is harmful to both prospective employees and the employer themselves. Finally, the idea of a virtual copy of yourself handling interviews in your stead, perhaps doing so across dozens of different employers simultaneously, interviewing another digital intelligence, is bizarre to me. Imagine being hired by a company without ever actually speaking to anyone there.
(2) It is fascinating to see how far technology has come and how it gets more and more advanced every year. Until listening to this podcast, I had no idea that AI based systems were screening out applicants by the millions. I always just assumed that an actual human being would look at your resume and then decide to hire you. This new era in hiring seems a little overwhelming now that AI systems are screening you. This podcast also reminded me of a random instagram post I saw recently on my explore page that said AI will cause certain jobs to disappear in the coming years. A couple jobs where AI could replace humans would be fast food cooks and store cashiers. In fact I have already seen this recently with store cashiers not being needed when I went to the new Amazon Fresh grocery store in Bellevue for the first time a couple weeks ago. They have this “Just Walk Out” technology where customers can skip the checkout line and just walk out the store when done shopping. All you do is just scan the QR code in the Amazon app that connects to the credit card linked to the account. I’m not exactly 100% sure how everything works but any item you take is automatically added to your virtual cart and any item you put back is removed from your virtual cart.
(3) As for the podcast, I was really surprised to see how the algorithms grade peoples applications for jobs. Its really amazing how many people could potentially be excluded due to these programs. I think more people should know about how these algorithms decide who has a good resume because it is really important in the hiring process this day and age. Its interesting how resumes used to primarily focus on making yours stand out with fonts and other eye appealing factors for readers, but now that is basically a waste of time. Resumes now need to be kind of cold and the information needs to be concrete with evidence of why you are qualified for the AI can easily see why you are a qualified candidate. A trick for getting by the AI interviewers that I thought was really interesting was doing AI mock interviews. I thought this could be super helpful to see exactly what you may be asked in future interviews and how to perform correctly when going against the AI’s algorithms even if they are almost impossible to trick. It is very concerning how the AI cannot tell between a AI and human interviewee as this can set up all sort of issues. One that quickly comes to mind is hiring someone to just do your interviews for you this could easily become a huge issue in the hiring process. We are entering a new era of interviewing in the job market and I am curious to see how I can beat the algorithms in my future job searches.
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