AI and Equitable Hiring in a Post-Pandemic World (Trend Brief)
Executive summary
The Great Equalizer?
As we rebuild the workforce, we can avoid repeating past mistakes.
A diverse workforce begins with a diverse candidate pool. Ensuring that the hiring process isn’t shutting out qualified, racially diverse candidates is more important now than ever. Recruiters and HR specialists must be intentional about mitigating bias in the hiring process, and this includes the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Although often thought of as objective methods of streamlining hiring workflow, AI hiring tools can automate rejections and narrow a candidate pool through a series of decisions that close the door to a wider range of qualified applicants.1 It can also give outsized emphasis to identified patterns.4 Without the benefit of human judgment or a moral compass, more complex machine-thinking can incorporate irrelevant data, leading to biased results.
The Nature of AI: Understanding How Bias Happens
Busy hiring managers sometimes use AI in the form of hiring algorithms that can quickly screen job applicants’ résumés, analyze large datasets, and reduce the amount of time it takes to find qualified candidates.1 Although AI algorithms may appear to be free from human bias, AI is only as unbiased as those who design, oversee, and input data into these systems.2
The very nature of AI means that systems are always learning and changing. As an algorithm grows more sophisticated, it uses broader data sets, ones that were not directly introduced by a human.3