How AI Can Kill Your Company
by Miki Saxon
Yesterday included a post about how tech has sold itself as the silver bullet solution to hiring people.
Algorithms actually do a lousy job of screening resumes and companies that rely on them miss a lot of great hires.
Why?
Because the only thing an algorithm can do is match key words and experience descriptions. Based on 13 years of tech recruiter experience I can tell you that rarely does anyone change jobs in order to do the same thing somewhere else, unless they hate their manager or the culture.
Not things that an algorithm is going to pick up on. Nor will the initial phone call usually made not by the hiring manager, but by someone who know little about the job other than to match the candidates responses to a list of “preferred” answers.
No discretionary knowledge based on the manager’s experience or the candidate’s potential.
We all know that management loves to save money and many of them feel that AI will allow them to reduce the most expensive item of their fixed costs, people — including managers.
Imagine an app giving you a quarterly evaluation—without a manager or HR rep in sight—and you have an idea of where this is potentially going.
What management forgets is that a company isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people, with shared values, all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.
It exists only as long as people are willing to join and are happy enough to stay — excessive turnover does not foster success.
So what do workers think about the use of AI/algorithms?
However, workers don’t necessarily like the idea of code taking over management functions—or hiring, for that matter. Pew research shows 57 percent of respondents think using algorithms for résumé screening is “unacceptable,” and 58 percent believe that bots taught by humans will always contain some bias. Nearly half (48 percent) of workers between the ages of 18 and 29 have some distrust of A.I. in hiring, showing that this negative perception isn’t going away anytime soon.
They are right to be distrustful, since AI is trained on historical datasets its “intelligence” includes all the bias, prejudices, bigotry and downright stupidity of past generations.
This is bad news for companies looking to “increase efficiency,” but great news for companies that recognize they aren’t hiring “resources” or “talent,” but people, with their infinite potential and inherent messiness.
Image credit: Mike MacKenzie
