On the last few years AI has taken a huge portion of interest from most people, notably by with the growth of AI systems such as ChatGPT. Although AI systems can be very helpfull to most people on their daily life and personal projects, it can also have some negative impact in some parts of the economy which global governments are trying to avoid.
It is also of public knowledge that hiring processes can be not only economically and time demanding for a company but also very difficult and one of the ways companies started to resolve this problem was by the use of AI Systems in the hiring process. The use of this technology have many « apparant » pros, such as: reduction of time by authomatisation of administrative tasks, improving cost per hire by reducing the number of platforms or personnel for each hire, make a predictive analysis, « reduce bias » and others.
Although many companies benefit from this type of technology, the use of AI can be very daughting to candidates. If we take for example the use of AI generated technology for interviews, the Newspaper The Guardian, did an article about this use which caused some negative emotions on the candidate, as per the following extract: « When Ty landed an introductory phone interview with a finance and banking company last month, they assumed it would be a quick chat with a recruiter. And when they got on the phone, Ty assumed the recruiter, who introduced herself as Jaime, was human. But things got robotic. “The voice sounded similar to Siri,” said Ty, who is 29 and lives in the DC metro area. “It was creepy.” »
This is only one of the cons of using AI in the recruitment process, others include a possible unknown bias. Many would say that by using AI there is a reduction of bias from HR, however a new bias problem is created by AI and that is the data sets that were used to train the AI System. If the data sets are unkown, which most of the times they are, this could create a problem such as the following presented by BBC: « In one case, one user who’d been screened out submitted the same application but tweaked the birthdate to make themselves younger. With this change, they landed an interview. At another company, an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed « baseball » or « basketball » – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned « softball » – typically women – were downgraded. »
As you can probably see, the use of AI in the recruitment process can have both positive and negative impacts, however this could create a high risk for the possible applicants. As such, the European Union on the AI Act determined that AI Systems used in recruitment processes should be determined as High Risk, and thus companies that use it are going to have more obligations than others.
In conclusion, AI and recruitment can be very difficult to regulate in order to create the best balance between HUMAN and AI. Too little human interaction can be detrimental and the lack of use of AI can make recruitment very slow (which can cause problems for the company), but only by trial and error balance can be attained.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/06/ai-interviews-job-applications
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958823000362
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240214-ai-recruiting-hiring-software-bias-discrimination
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artificial-intelligence-adopting-recruitings-worst-practices-ehlers-neqgc/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pros-cons-using-artificial-intelligence-hiring-unnanu-nnljc/
https://www.jobylon.com/blog/how-ai-is-transforming-the-world-of-recruitment
