It appears the use of AI in the hiring process is finally hitting mainstream awareness. The Wall Street Journal just released a video report about the role of artificial intelligence in the job search. As part of their Moving Upstream series that explores new trends and technologies, the WSJ investigated two companies that use artificial intelligence to decide if you get hired: HireVue and DeepSense.
The video is worth watching, especially if you’re in the job search or working in career services.
The video begins with an introduction to HireVue, a platform that uses machine learning to assess and rank users on their video interview performance. The video provides an overview of the scoring process and the science behind their facial analysis software from HireVue’s chief psychologist. The company uses millions of data points taken from a candidate’s facial expressions, language choice, and tone of voice to measure and determine a candidate’s fit for a job.
There’s a notable part of the video when the journalist asks the psychologist if all interview videos are reviewed by a human. The psychologist chooses his words carefully, noting that recruiters could watch all the videos if they wanted. But we all know that’s not likely. HireVue exists to make the interview process more efficient. Their product is marketed as a way to save time. It’s not efficient if recruiters have to watch every video.
Later in the the video we meet a college student. He estimates that almost half of his interviews have taken place on HireVue. He’s not a huge fan because he thinks it’s hard to show his true self in video interviews.
There’s likely another reason he dislikes it: Interview preparation requires hours of preparation. Thinking on your feet and providing authentic, yet impactful responses, takes a lot of work in the interview process. It’s hard enough knowing you have to impress a human. But knowing a human many never hear your answers is disappointing. It’s the resume black hole on steroids.
The video report includes some welcome skepticism towards new HR tech from Ifeoma Ajunwa, sociologist and law professor at Cornell University. When asked about the validity of microexpressions, she explains:
It’s still a developing science. The important thing is, there is no clear established pattern of what facial expression is needed for any job. Applicants can be eliminated for facial expressions that have nothing to do with the job.”
AI is Changing the Entire Hiring Process
Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing interviews. It’s changing how candidates are hired at every stage of the hiring process. The WSJ video goes on to profile Deepsense, an AI platform that builds a behavioral profile for every person. The company creates a behavioral profile based on social data taken from publicly available data from sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.
The DeepSense AI process
Then they use the data to “run scientifically based tests to surface people’s personality traits.” In a separate article, the cofounder and CEO of Frrole (which developed DeepSense), notes: “One thing people don’t realize is that how little data is required to start making deductions about you, and probably correct enough.”
Screenshot of Deepsense dashboard from WSJ video report
Probably correct enough. That’s tough to read when the stakes are so high. The job search is an emotionally exhausting process. Job seekers have families to support, dreams to achieve, health insurance to secure, and bills to pay. They expect to be evaluated fairly and accurately. Probably correct enough isn’t enough in a high stakes situation.
Currently a big five consulting firm is using their service.
The potential for discrimination and bias with new HR technology is high. How do you ensure your public data is correct? How do you challenge the methodology behind the collection/selection of that data? How do you know if you’ve been discriminated against if it’s all done by algorithmic decision?
Beyond the potential for discrimination and bias coded into algorithms, there’s another disturbing bit of information from that video: job seekers may not know they’re being evaluated by an algorithm. As the WSJ reporter notes:
“I go into this knowing something that HireVue acknowledges many job candidates potentially do not. That my responses are being assessed not by human beings, but by AI, analyzing my tone of voice, the clusters of words I use, and my microexpressions.”
Do people know that every post, article, tweet they put on line can now be analyzed and scored as a basis for hiring? These questions, and plenty more, urgently need answers as companies implement new hiring technology.
This podcast episode caught me totally off guard. I’ve been listening to ZigZag, a podcast that follows Manoush Zomorodi (who hosted the incredible Note to Self podcast) and Jen Poyant as they build a new kind of media company built on cryptocurrency. It’s a show they describe as “a podcast about changing the course of capitalism, journalism, and women’s lives. For real.” And that’s completely accurate. ZigZag has also made the subject of crypto so much less douchey and boring.
So when I saw that Anthony Bourdain was making a posthumous appearance on ZigZag I was pretty surprised. The episode features a recorded conversation between reporter Maria Bustillios and Anthony Bourdain over a meal in mid-town Manhattan. It’s a beautiful conversation, filled with disagreements, and perspective exchange, stories, and everything else you might expect to have with him. The story behind how the reporter got the interview is equally interesting.
What are the jobs of the future and when will they get here? The answer is now. Mya Systems makes a chatbot that conducts interviews. They work at the cutting edge of Natural Language Processing and are making waves in HR Tech spaces. (full disclosure: I contract with them to design chatbots). They’re also hiring for cutting edge jobs like this one: Language Annotator. It’s a contract role for a current student, ideally someone in the liberal arts! They’re looking for a student with literature or philosophy background with strong communication skills and an understanding of machine learning. Bonus if they’ve got foreign language skills. This post touches my machine-learning-obsessed-and-liberal-arts-loving soul.
The job:
The jobs of the future are hybrid jobs. Hybrid jobs combine soft skills with digital skills. You’ll find hybrid jobs through out the job listings; popular hybrid jobs right now are product managers and data translators.
These are the jobs we need to train students and alumni for in order to prepare them for an automated workforce. The future of work is already here.
Results from an informal survey from the Career Leadership Collective which asked career services professionals: Which of the following do career teams spend way too much time and energy on?
Here’s a career coach confession: I hate resume critiques. This attitude was wildly inconvenient during my days as an MBA career coach in university career services. At the beginning of the school year my days were filled with helping students revise resumes. As the year progressed many coaching sessions slipped into tiny requests for additional reviews. Few people enjoyed the resume critique experience, me included.
Resume writing is a niche skill that few people master in the course of their career. The process is fraught with frustration. Students spend hours trying to get it right while career coaches spend hours telling them it’s not quite right. All of this so a recruiter can spend 6 seconds reviewing it. And now it’s no longer guaranteed that your resume will be reviewed by a human, as algorithms are increasingly being used to analyze candidate resumes.
The unpleasant experience of resume reviews is usually a student’s first exposure to career services. It’s a lame first impression for a department whose goal is to help students. Worse yet knowing how to write resumes does little to prepare students for a future in which 2.5 million new job types will be created. If career services exists to prepare students for future careers, resume reviews shouldn’t dominate staff’s time.
What if career services didn’t teach resume writing?
The resume of the near future will be a document with far more information—and information that is far more useful—than the ones we use now. Farther out, it may not be a resume at all, but rather a digital dossier, perhaps secured on the blockchain (paywall), and uploaded to a global job-pairing engine that is sorting you, and billions of other job seekers, against millions of openings to find the perfect match. – The Resume of the Future
Telling career services they should stop teaching resume writing and avoid resume reviews isn’t a popular opinion. I raised the idea once at the beginning of the year in my last job. My bosses both looked at me like I was crazy. They promptly ignored my question.I meant it as a thought exercise. I also meant it as a way to interrupt the autopilot that each MBA career office kicks into at the start of a new school year.
When I’ve raised the issue with colleagues respond, they often respond with “But who will teach resume writing?” A quick answer might be YouTube. Another option is VMOCK, Leap.ai and jobscan.co, two platforms which are using machine learning to give resume feedback and guidance at scale. Both platforms provide immediate, visual feedback, including language suggestions, at a scale no career coach can match.
Resume feedback by jobscan.co
Resumes aren’t dead. But in a world of resume reviews by algorithm, LinkedIn networks, and personal websites, they sure don’t hold the key to a successful job search and career like they used to. Career services should cut back on resume reviews now while focusing on the skills that better prepare students for the changing nature of work.
Below are a several focus areas to fill the space of resume reviews and better prepare our students for the future of work. These skills prepare students to adapt to the new workforce, succeed in the college job search, and every job search after.
Upskilling and lifelong learning
It’s something that has been a bit of a mantra in the educational field. Everyone is going to have to be a student for life and embark on lifelong learning. The fact is right now it’s still mainly a slogan. Even within jobs and companies there’s not lifelong training. In fact what we see in corporate training data at least in the United States, is that companies are spending less. As we know right now people expect that they get their education in the early 20s or late 20s and then they’re done. They’re going to go off and work for 40, 50 years. And that model of getting education up front and working for many decades, without ever going through formal or informal training again is clearly not going to be the reality for the next generation.” –How Will Automation Affect Jobs, Skills, and Wages?,
A bachelor’s degree is no guarantee for future job security. Students need to plan for lifelong learning beyond university. That includes understanding options for learning new skills. From online courses to bootcamps to nano-degrees, students need to training on how to identify skill gaps and match them with programs that close that gap. Whether it’s trying out virtual real-life projects, such as those at QLC, or pairing their studies with a coding bootcamp, students benefit from exploring these learning opportunities before they are on the open job market. This goes double for career services that serve alumni populations.
Strategic Research and Data Collection
From LinkedIn and Quora, to Glassdoor and AngelList, students are swimming in public data about companies. Students need to be taught methodologies for identifying and evaluating opportunities using a variety of sources. Let’s reframe informational interviews as a tool for learning and a method for collecting qualitative data through in-depth interviewing. Teach students how data helps them investigate a company to gain insights they can use to outsmart their competition, negotiate well, and plan their next career move.
Ability to Identify Emerging Jobs
Robots may be taking jobs but new jobs and career paths emerging in the chaos. As organizations change and experiment with new technology, so will the existing jobs inside those organizations. With an expected 133 million new jobs to be created from AI and automation comes an unquantifiable number of jobs that will have to change to support these new roles. We must teach students how to find these jobs.
For example the emerging field of conversation design is quite new. Job titles aren’t consistent. Jobs in conversation design include Voice Interaction Designer (VUI), Interaction Designer, User Experience Designer, Conversational Experience Designer, UX content Strategist, Conversation designer. The path into these roles is as varied as the job descriptions. While some job postings call for a background in linguistics, others prefer English majors, and for some a degree doesn’t even matter. A recent job posting for a Voice UI Designer for a virtual cooking assistant didn’t even require a degree. Instead they want someone who collaborates with visual design and software teams and has a love for foreign language. Career services must teach students how to identify and position themselves for emerging jobs.
Digital Marketing
Clean Google search results, LinkedIn profiles, and personal websites are must-haves in today’s job search. Newer HR technology, like Entelo, analyzes a job seekers’ digital footprints to determine if they’re a fit for a role. Students need to create an integrated online presencethat shows off their skills as they move throughout a lifetime of multiple career changes. Since the majority of a job search is done through email, students also need to be taught how to write concise, impactful messages to diverse people they’ll interact with in the job search. In a crowded world of emails, texts, and Slack messages, students must learn how to capture a contact’s attention and make the right ask to reach their goals.
Emotional intelligence and communication skills are top skills for the future of work. For the job search, they’re essential. Yet the ability to have face-to-face conversation is on the decline thanks to increasing use of digital technology in in our professional and personal lives. We must ensure students know how to have authentic conversations with all the people they’ll meet in the job search. Then we need to build on those skills to teach persuasion. Persuasion touches so many pieces of the job search, from informational interviews to negotiation. To persuade effectively, students must identify what they offer and choose the right message and method to communicate it to their audience.
Creative Storytelling
Ditch the elevator pitches. Elevator pitches imply that students will always be pitching in the same context each time (you’ve only got 20 seconds to impress the CEO who’s probably checking her phone in the elevator anyway). They were designed for a time when access to important people was limited – a time before Twitter and LinkedIn allowed anyone to reach out and be seen by executives and founders. Moreover, pitches are static. Today’s job seekers are multidimensional with changing interests and goals over the course of their career. By teaching storytelling, students learn creative tactics to adapt their message in any context and stage of their professional life.
Virtual Presence
Students interact in virtual spaces like Snapchat and YouTube regularly. Let’s teach them to polish their virtual presence so they can present and collaborate in remote environments. With virtual interviews and interest in remote work among college graduates on the rise, students need to learn the skills to succeed in virtual teams. Let’s teach them how to work and build relationships in remote environments, where often their only connection to the team is Slack gifs.
So, to all the career services staff who dream of spending less time on resume reviews, I challenge you. At your next staff meeting, ask the question:
What if we didn’t teach resume writing or conduct review resumes? How might we teach students instead?
You might just come up with a new model for the future of career education.
20. That travel and hospitality schools, barring few exceptions, are training the young for jobs of the previous generation, instead of all the new types of positions opening up in travel and allied sectors. In fact, the deans, professors and teachers are more clueless about the current and future of the travel industry than the students they are teaching. – 21 Uncomfortable Truths That I Have Learned About the Travel Industry
The founder and CEO of Skift, a global travel intelligence company, wrote a killer post on the uncomfortable truths about the travel industry. Having worked several years in the travel industry, it was refreshing to read it. Most of these truths are usually confined to conference conversations after a few drinks. They’re rarely shared publicly. Judging from the shares and comments on the article, it’s clear it resonated with others too.
I would love to see this list for other industries.
Reply All is always good for a rabbit hole ride. Their episodes frequently take you down internet holes that you never knew existed. This episode, All My Pets, is no different, this time taking you down the YouTuber rabbit hole of exotic pets, overnight fame on YouTube, and what exactly happens at those YouTube conventions (probably not what the kids are calling them these days…).
FAQ from Teramind, a software that records, logs, and monitors employees.
Corporate America enjoys spying on its workers. According to Wired, “94 percent of organizations currently monitor workers in some way.” Even worse, you likely can’t escape it. From The Creative Ways Your Boss is Spying on You:
Try to hide from this all-seeing eye of corporate America—and you might make matters worse. Even the cleverest spoofing hacks can backfire. “The more workers try to be invisible, the more managers have a hard time figuring out what’s happening, and that justifies more surveillance,” says Michel Anteby, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Boston University. He calls it the “cycle of coercive surveillance.” Translation: lose/lose.
Is it appropriate now to inquire during the interview stage ask what technology the company uses to spy on workers? If not now, when will it be appropriate?
Also, who monitors the executives? Who monitors the monitors?
Yobs.io isn’t the first HR tech company to promise better candidate selection technology through AI and predictive analytics. HireVue has been using algorithms to review and assess video interviews for companies like Unilever and JP Morgan, and they’ve got $93 million in funding to do it. AI technology is rapidly changing the job search.
Yobs.io, however, positions itself as a platform that can identify a candidate’s soft skills and improve team dynamics. Their tech implements “quantiative soft skills analysis in the recruitment.” It claims its platform “determines the emotional state of your candidate which reflect the real-time soft skills that they will take to the job everyday.” Their algorithms analyze facial expressions, word choice and tone, and even head speed to predict candidate success in an organization.
I find it hilarious that employers are banging the drums about the need for employees with soft skills yet they’re increasingly willing to hand over the process of selecting people with those same skills to a machine.
I work on interview chatbots and conversational AI in my contract work. I find it fascinating. I enjoy watching the algorithm improve and seeing its limitations. However, technology that uses personality assessments and predictive analytics to make hiring decisions fills me with questions. They’re questions that I rarely see addressed in tech media or HR industry coverage. They’re questions in need of answers that aren’t marketing copy.
Just look at that engagement level! Source: Yobs.io website
Here’s the ongoing list of questions I never see answers to:
How are companies evaluating whether hires by AI are better than human-led hires? Is this technology trusted for use in all hires, including executive management? Moreover, do the AI engineers have the soft skills they’re designing algorithms for? Does it matter if they don’t? Do the managers who oversee the implementation of this technology also have the soft skills they seek?
Also…
Why should my head speed be part of my interview evaluation? How much weight is my head speed given in the algorithm? What is a quality head speed and how does it affect my ability to do a job that I’ve trained for? Who decides what interview tone is appropriate? Would a monotone AI engineer with an abnormal head speed, a high rate of neuroticism, low rate of extraversion be an acceptable hire (trick question, of course they would, they’re the most in-demand occupation)
And…
Who loses out on an opportunity during the tuning phase of the algorithm? Algorithms don’t work perfectly out of the gate. What feedback loops exist inside the organization’s that use this tech to ensure they’re not getting false negatives? How do HR tech companies who claim to reduce bias prove they actual reduce bias rather than reinforce it?
Humans are flawed. But so are algorithms and even the data we use to build them. Just because it can be measured (head speed) doesn’t mean it needs to be. Asking the hard questions about new technology is important, especially in high stakes situations like job interviews and career progression.
Also, I’m parking this fab find here: Yobs.io uses the big 5 personality traits (OCEAN) to predict candidate fit. There’s a fabulous overview of the Big 5 that includes psych student videos explaining the big 5 concepts. Highly recommend watching these videos, especially when they discuss the person-situation debate.
Curious about how AI technology might change your job? The NYT offers a glimpse at how algorithms are changing traditional roles. In retail, fashion buyers who are normally tasked with making purchasing decisions, are increasingly using algorithms to do the task. These algorithms make fashion decisions and predict the next big trend, a task normally associated creative geniuses. With so much consumer data, predicting trends and stock levels is left to the machines, no intuition needed.
“Retailers adept at using algorithms and big data tend to employ fewer buyers and assign each a wider range of categories, partly because they rely less on intuition.
At Le Tote, an online rental and retail service for women’s clothing that does hundreds of millions of dollars in business each year, a six-person team handles buying for all branded apparel — dresses, tops, pants, jackets.”
The result is two-fold: the industry is using fewer buyers in the decision-making process and retailers are increasingly hiring people who can “stand between machines and customers.” The article notes that there are plenty of areas where automation can’t do the job. Negotiating with suppliers, assessing fabric transparency, and styling all need a human touch.
Instead of replacing all the humans, algorithms are changing how we work. As a result, future roles (and managers) will demand employees who understand understand how to use algorithms to make decisions that improve the final product, while also understanding the limitations of the technology.
In the future of work (which is already here and we need a better phrase), we’re going to need a lot more of these employees.
This tweet summed up all my feels on the soul-crushing burden that is student loans:
I’ve paid $33,685.71 towards my $50K in student loans. That bitch is still at $48,000. Fuck interest. Fuck FedLoan. Fuck this education system. Fuck everything.
It should surprise nobody that this tweet currently sits at 47K retweets. On a follow up tweet she adds that these are all federal loans, not even private ones.
This is the reality of being buried by student loans. Scroll through the responses too and you’ll see even more people crushed by higher education debt.
I understand this all too well. I’ve paid $24K towards my $52K and my balance says $73K 😤
