Job Search 2020: AI Is the New Gatekeeper to Your Dream Career – Observer

Many companies have turned to artificial intelligence to lead job candidacy searches and cherry pick job applicants Welcome to the Wild West of Hiring. Pixabay

The new job search question to ask yourself: What if AI doesnt like me?

This is the obstacle now faced by college graduates hoping to land their first dream job. Yes, the human resources departments at companies are steering further away from humans and embracing artificial intelligence in their job candidacy searches.

SEE ALSO: Can Artificial Intelligence Determine If You Have a Toxic Workplace?

So now, job seekers, its all about winning the algorithm game.

According to CNN, career counselors at bigwig schools, such as Duke University, Purdue University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, are priming students on what companies use AIand how to outfox the algorithms.

Gone are such job interview preparations as mentioned in thisold-timey video from the archaic days of 2010.

Companies looking to fill internships and entry-level positions aresteering more toward using platforms, such as HireVue, to help conduct a vast number of interviews via video that are analyzed by AI.HireVue, whose headquarters is in Salt Lake City, is used by over 800 companies including CNN, Hilton and Unilever. (Thats up from 50 companies in 2018.)

CEO Kevin Parker told The Wall Street Journalthat the companys platform removes human biases from the job interview process. And he said that like its a good thing.

And this is becoming the new norm, in terms of job interview preparation: how to make a good job interview video.

Well interview probably a million college kids this year, Parker told CNN.

You can see the appeal for a company to use the HireVue platform. The candidates simply answer a set of predetermined questions via their laptop or smartphone camera. And then, the videos are run through the algorithm ringernoting such details as facial expressions (captured by facial analysis software), voice tonality, word usage and grammar. (Sorry, foreign job candidates and those with botox.)

The applicants performance is then compared to actual company employees and then a score is given. The analysis is said to determine which candidates would make a good team member (who also happen to have good facial expressions and voice tonality).

The job applicant rejects, on the other hand, will have their videos posted immediately on YouTube for the world to mock. (This part isnt true, I repeat, not truebut you never know what the future holds.)

Do you foresee any problems with AI breaking down job candidates into a series of ones and zeros? Gone from this equation is personal interactions, a sense of soul and actually looking someone directly in the eye.

Now that companies are turning to AI to be the job hiring gatekeeper, does artificial intelligence have the capacity to determine humor, irony and, in general, the heart and kindness of a person? The same type of questions were asked when we dove into whether or not artificial intelligence could determine if you have a toxic workplace.

Heres more on the nuts and bolts of how AI cherry picks job applicants, which has been called the Wild West of hiring.

So not only do we have to worry about robots stealing our jobs, but we also have to worry about a machine not hiring us.

Whats next in our present job quest dystopia? Will job applicants also have to take the VK test from Blade Runner?

HireVue believes its platform can be helpful for ushering a massive number of people through the interview process quickly and reviewing them in a fair, consistent way. The big fear is that AI has the potential to replace humans doing the same job. (In this case, its humans doing human resource manager jobs.) In the medical field, using AI makes sense for things, such as scanning for breast cancer. Its becoming a tool to assist real-life doctors by giving an analytical second opinion. Therefore, it complements the professionand saves lives.

But in this case, in which AI is the job gatekeeper, it simply allows companies to throw as many plates of job seeker spaghetti against the wall with no added effort. All it really does is waste the time of the optimistic job applicants. No time is wasted by the company to allow a million job seeking monkeys to send out a million job seeking application videosin hopes that one algorithm will produce the entire works of Shakespeareand be hired.

Basically, these entry-level, intern-seeking graduates are the guinea pigs for an AI-produced workforce of tomorrow. What flaws will we find in this system and what future lawsuits will arise?

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Job Search 2020: AI Is the New Gatekeeper to Your Dream Career - Observer