How AI can help and hurt job candidates and those seeking to hire them

“There’s there’s been a massive shift in the way people work, and where they work and how they work,” Allen Born, of Berwyn-based Fairmount Partners, said during a panel at Philadelphia Alliance for Technology and Capital’s (PACT) Phorum conference this week. “How does AI and the future of work impact that?”

Parth Thaker, executive director of strategic development at Comcast, said the company already uses AI technology in many of its projects. The company’s voice-controlled remote uses natural language processing to order up channels or shows — one example that many of its customers interact with on a daily basis. A less obvious use of AI is in the company’s network technologies: Comcast uses AI to proactively identify areas where its network may be facing issues so that they don’t have to wait for a customer or a business to report an issue.

Thaker said he foresees AI impacting all parts of the recruiting and hiring process in the years to come, from funnel sourcing candidates to the interview process and even doing case studies of valuation models. He called it a great “assisted task” tool for recruiting professionals.

Because a common concern about AI is its potential for bias (it’s created by humans, after all), he also hopes that AI evolves to allow for automated screening tools to become more accurate and equitable — that “this technology evolves where it’s able to actually be much more thoughtful around career progression,” Thaker said. That could happen through obfuscating personally identifiable information, “so that everybody’s candidacy is viewed in an almost level playing field.”

OK, but if an AI told you to put nothing on your resume, fire that bot. (Photo by Pexels user Anna Shvets via a Creative Commons license)

In the last few years, Vlad Coric, head of data science at SEI, has been building intelligence algorithms that extract information from documents that drive business value for its customers. His team has also helped the human resources teams with natural language processing on surveys, databases and key trends in unstructured data.

He called out the potential loss of human touch if too much of the hiring process were automated or run by artificial intelligence. Those looking to switch careers could likely get lost in the shuffle, he said, if their “skills” portion of their resume didn’t match a job posting.

“If AI is not training properly, it’s not accounting for these kind of use cases, and it can reject candidates immediately,” Coric said.

Pittsburgh-based Samantha Bussard is director of talent strategy at Compass Business Solutions. She called out one the pitfalls of artificial intelligence — biases — as a current barrier to using it well for recruiting.

“Are we leaving populations behind who don’t have access to those types of technology or aren’t using them in the way that we would readily assume that the general population is?” she asked.

And while it can be a helpful tool, Bussard said, the human factor of hiring can’t be replaced. Humans are responsible for the bias baked into artificial intelligence, but they can also supersede it. Just because someone isn’t necessarily right for a role on paper — which is all an AI bot would recognize — doesn’t mean they aren’t right for your organization.

“Artificial intelligence in the recruiting process facilitates a lot,” Bussard said. “It doesn’t do away with the need for human interaction and human connection and validation of, how does someone fit into an organization or a role when you sit across the table from them — or virtually sit across the table from them — and feel the energy and feel how they represent your organization.”