Robot as interviewer - a guided thought exercise
Saw this bbc article about using an artificial intelligence robot for interviews. At first I felt that this seemed an unnecessary extra step to the hiring process, but then I thought about it a bit more & realized that there may be points beyond my gut reaction that likely made it a project worthy of a team's devotion to developing it.
In my graduate studies, I've come to understand that bias are mental heuristics that help us make decisions, but mental heuristics are generally formed under contexts that help individuals survive in short run, rather than helping organizations thrive in the long run.
In short - It's not just about bias against people who don't look like they fit a role. It's also about bias FOR people who interview extremely well, but are actually bad for a team in ways that make them good in an interview.
Here are some prompts to help you play with the topic for yourself:
Things to notice
- do you have a visceral reaction to this? What is the core motivation of this visceral reaction?
- is this core motivation useful from a societal perspective (not just from the perspective of your own employability...etc. Don't join the conversation if you're only thinking about yourself.). If it's from a personal perspective, discard for now.
- is the core motivation due to disgust with a group of people you think are too radical? this is too generalized to answer for every case where certain keywords come up and trigger you. It is unworthy of public discourse & yourself as a proponent of the position. discard for now & dig deeper. (you may be right, but at that level of generalization you are never right.)
- think beyond what they are proposing as anti-bias & all the evidence we have of how humans make decisions, & the people who are there to make the decisions.
- think about the comments that seem to be pro-disadvantaged interviewee ie. "you want to know if the interviewer is biased so you know the company culture & can choose to not work there." How does this make sense from a power structure or curated population perspective?
- if you want to say something, think first about how you would supplement or supplant this with something better.
-Read the comments on this facebook post by the World Economic Forum on this topic. They are mostly negative & many are replete with logical fallacies - thus an excellent resource to clarify your own thinking!
The fundamental questions are:
1. does this robot help recruit people who are good for the job as well as, if not better than a human recruiter?
2. does this robot the government fulfill it's fundamental role of promoting a stable, resilient society?
If a robot interviewer doesn't fulfill criteria 2, governments should not support it. If it doesn't fulfill criteria 1, companies will not will use it regardless of what the government wants.
While the current format of this AI interview seems antithetical to something like what a human interviewer can do in this article on interviewing tips, there might be something here worth understanding.
There is something in between the space of "if you can't beat them, join them." & that is the necessary space of having a clear rationale for the why of a system. There may come a point in time when you are in a position to make a key decision, & you'll want to be comfortable with your decision. If we can't do this, how much better are we than a computer program?