How AI-powered hiring can go awry

Although the benefits of AI in the hiring process are clear, the risks may be even clearer. As recruiters increasingly deploy AI for an ever-widening array of hiring functions, they need to be fully cognizant of the ways it can be misused and the potential consequences of relying on it too heavily. To mitigate these risks, recruiters should know how to use AI transparently, implement effective safeguards, and integrate AI with human intelligence.?

There are many ways AI can create serious problems for recruiters. For example, a company could use a chatbot to answer candidates’ questions during the hiring process – a perfectly reasonable strategy, as inadequate communication is a major reason candidates abandon that process. But what if the chatbot provides inconsistent and inaccurate answers? This won’t just create confusion and frustration, it could also lead to litigation and severe reputational harm if the chatbot is responsible for discriminatory outcomes. In 2018, Amazon was forced to abandon a machine learning recruiting engine because it systematically rated women lower than men.?

Because language models like ChatGPT are trained on huge amounts of text from innumerable digital sources, they reflect the biases and inaccuracies already present in those datasets. As OpenAI acknowledges, ChatGPT will “sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior” and write “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”??

One of the most intractable problems with AI (especially in the context of recruiting) is the fact that its decision-making process is obscure. When an AI system produces an answer, there’s often no way to determine which steps it took to get there. This leads to a lack of transparency in the hiring process, and it leaves companies in an untenable position in the event of disputes or legal challenges – how can you prove that your decisions were non-discriminatory if you don’t know how they were made? It’s also difficult to course-correct after bad hiring decisions without insight into the reasoning behind those decisions.?

These are reminders that AI should always be augmented by human intelligence in the hiring process. Although AI is a valuable tool for identifying and interacting with candidates, hiring professionals still have to make informed final decisions about who is best for the job. By combining the efficiency of AI with the use of transparent assessment and selection criteria, companies will build a hiring process that is simultaneously fairer and more rigorous.

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