I finally changed my mind about AI hiring tools after seeing my cousin's rejection

My cousin applied for a warehouse job at a big company near Atlanta last month. She has 8 years of experience and perfect attendance at her old job. She got a rejection email 12 hours later with no interview. I told her it was probably just a busy HR department, but she showed me the job posting used an automated screening AI. I looked into it and found out these systems can filter out people based on weird patterns like gaps in employment or even the way a resume is formatted. Now I get why people are worried about bias in these tools. Has anyone else seen friends or family get passed over by automated systems?

3 comments

3 Comments

kai_park26d ago

Started looking into this after my neighbor got ghosted by a similar system at a distribution center. She had like 15 years experience loading trucks and her application just disappeared into the void. I spent an hour messing around with those resume screening tools online and found out they flag people for stuff like having a comma where a period should be or using the wrong font. It's wild that a computer can toss out a qualified person because of formatting tricks that have nothing to do with their actual skills. Makes you wonder how many good workers are getting overlooked because of some algorithm quirk, right?

barbaraw4726d ago

Yeah I actually read something about this in a business magazine my husband brought home. They tested these AI resume screeners and found they reject applications with words like "helped" instead of "managed" or if you use bullets instead of paragraphs. @kai_park your neighbor got the raw end of it for sure. It's basically like playing a game where the rules change depending on which company made the software that day. I heard one company's system flagged someone for using a photo on their resume because the AI thought it was a different person applying. The whole thing is just dumb. You got people who can actually do the work getting passed over because some algorithm can't handle a tiny formatting thing.

lisak2625d ago

I mean, is it really that bad though? Your cousin with 8 years experience probably got looked over because there were like 200 other people with the same background applying too, not just because of some algorithm. People love to blame computers but sometimes it's just a numbers game.