RWL #195
Artificial Intelligence and Hiring
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Is it really October already? We turned on the heat two weeks ago during a cold snap, and I brought my house slippers back out, but this week has really been lovely. The cold snap has accelerated the foliage change, as you can see from the picture above. I took that shot from a train bridge just around the corner from The Last Homely House (the LHH is off to the right about 150M in this picture). It is a beautiful time to be in New England.
This week has been pretty intense - I will be submitting my tenure packet on Monday, and I’ve been working on finishing up a paper - so this letter is short. I did fall upon a pretty specific theme, kind of by accident. AI hiring - it’s a thing, like it or not. I think it will be especially important for entry level, high volume hiring. Here’s a new area where it would have been hard to predict automation would take over, but just like the factories of the 1980’s, the offices of the 2020’s are going to be drained out of entry level white collar jobs.
Stay well and stay safe.
Read
What: Vox, Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-intelligence-ai-job-screen
Why: This is a great read about the growing use of AI in applicant screening. From the article:
These AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on and the humans that build them. If a résumé-screening machine learning tool is trained on historical data, such as résumés collected from a company’s previously hired candidates, the system will inherit both the conscious and unconscious preferences of the hiring managers who made those selections. That approach could help find stellar, highly qualified candidates. But Rieke warns that method can also pick up “silly patterns that are nonetheless real and prominent in a data set.”
I was at a conference last summer and listened to some research on these technologies. It was fascinating, but the key takeaway was you get what you ask for - in spades. The problem is knowing what to ask the AI to do. Some of the problems the researchers I listened to talked about were related to all sorts of subtle biases (and sometimes not so subtle).
Watch
What: TED, Ray Dalio, How to build a company where the best ideas win
Why: Dalio is the founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. He tells a story of how he realized his own decision making was imperfect, in part because he wasn’t getting the best information. He developed a culture of radical transparency where everyone is entitled to criticize everyone’s performance. I’ve heard Dalio talk before about the transparency component of the culture, but I’ve never heard him describe the algorithmic portion he discusses in this video. That, coupled with the radical transparency makes this a must watch. My reflection here is the algorithm is really worth thinking about. The computer captures data about your past behavior, much like the AI behind Google and Facebook. When you say you believe one thing, the algorithm will know whether you will actually act on that statement or not. What you do, rather than what you say, is your “revealed preferences”. If you say you’re a neat freak, but your desk is a mess, you’re not really a neat freak. You may aspire to be a neat freak, but you aren’t actually a neat freak. What gets more complicated is when we have deep-seated beliefs about ourselves that are more subtle than whether we are neat or not, and those deep-seated beliefs aren’t accurate. This kind of delusion is common in narcissism and other extreme mental pathologies, but we all have a mismatch to some degree between our self-image and reality, for better or worse. But we will soon be surrounded by AI technology that will know us better than ourselves. It seems like Dalio is using AI (learning algorithms) to bring those mismatches to light. We will likely have the ability to do that at work and in our personal lives in the not too distant future. AI will be an indifferent mirror. And I think you will want to look into that indifferent mirror, because otherwise all of the other entities around you will know the truth about you, and you will be the only one operating under a delusion. Facebook and Google already probably know you better than you know yourself. You may as well also know yourself. I think it’s fascinating.
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Listen
What: WSJ Future of Everything, AI Hiring, Never Retiring: Working in the 21st Century
Why: The first part of this podcast talks about the use of AI to review applicants for jobs. It fits with the Dalio video above. I have my students take the Myers-Briggs personality indicator and the Big Five during my management classes just to spur some conversation about personality and finding jobs that fit them. It turns out AI is being trained to Google-stalk you, pull down your LinkedIn account, your public Facebook posts, and the rest of your internet footprint and sift through all of that data to build a personality profile. I think this is both scary and fascinating - as most things are with AI. One of the problems I have with self-scored personality tests is the same problem I identified above - self-knowledge. The AI approach takes out all our own willful blind spots about our behavior and looks at what we actually said and did on the internet when we weren’t thinking about being tested. There is still an element of self-presentation, but even that would reveal particular personality traits. It’s really cool. And really Big Brother.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)