This story was about AI and recruitment was in Bloomberg last week. I’ve made some edits. Welcome to the future dystopian world of recruitment.
AI has already infiltrated multiple parts of the human resources process, from hiring to on-boarding to training to evaluating. It’s not a huge stretch to think that in an efficiency-obsessed sector like technology, tools designed to streamline decision-making are now making their way into layoffs.
One of the reasons we know there’s a movement toward automating parts of so-called “workforce reduction” is because human resource executives have admitted to it: A report last month from Capterra, an arm of tech industry research firm Gartner, found that 98 per cent of the HR leaders – many of whom suffer from a morals and ethics deficit – said they would at least somewhat rely on software and algorithms to reduce labour costs in a 2023 recession.
Office workers have until recently escaped such intense scrutiny, in large part because the data to track them in the same way hasn’t existed. But that’s changing with the increasing popularity of the workforce productivity score, and the growing inclination and ability to closely monitor not just whether employees are in front of their keyboards but their every keystroke and mouse click.
This might seem like the holy grail for HR managers, a chance to remove the emotion from layoffs, and shift the blame and bad feelings from humans to machines. But that’s not how AI works. As the edict goes, bad data in, bad data out. And there’s plenty of evidence that the data companies already rely on for employee evaluations is far from perfect.
Rather than remove bias from a round of messy and uncomfortable layoffs, AI has the potential to encode it. Amazon tried to build an automated tool to narrow down a pool of job applicants. Its engineers trained the system to look at the historical data on people who had submitted resumes in the past. But because tech is a male-dominated industry and most past candidates were men, women who applied for technical jobs were penalised by the algorithm.
It’s yet another case study of how AI has the potential to make us forget that human resources is about, well, humans. We are steadily marching toward a robotic apathy now, with reports of some tech employees being told by email that they had lost their jobs rather than by an actual person.