The order is out – kill the AI resume scanners!
You’ve written the resume and it’s a killer. You’re perfect for the job. Education. Tick. Training. Tick. Referees. Tick. You’ve even got a short testimonial from the head of HR when you did a workplace for the company you’re applying for. Big Tick.
You send it off and there’s a spring in your step. A week passes. Two weeks pass and you ring up the recruiter. She says, ‘sorry but the AI resume scanner dumped your resume. It didn’t have enough key words and it didn’t like the format’
That’s a real story. AI software is excising the resumes of the best candidates.
I run Republic Resumes in Adelaide and I’ve written more than 5000 resumes. I help people get jobs.
Highly qualified job applicants are being dumped by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), which use boutique software wrapped in psychometric psychobabble, which only passes resumes if they have a specific format or keywords.
Companies such as Expr3ss! and others promise to ‘supercharge retention’, ‘reduce staff churn’ and create an ‘outstanding workplace’.
They promise to save money the business money by outsourcing the hire process to a robot. I call this ‘outsourcing one’s brain’.
Businesses live and die by the people they hire. They might not always find their way through a rat maze of psychometric tests but when you speak to them, you know within five minutes you’ve hit gold.
Australian businesses are on the cusp of using body-language analysis, vocal assessments and gamified tests to hire people.
Job applicants will face a battery of machine prompts and then AI will decide whether they’re a good match or not. The software doesn’t even tell them how they’ve been evaluated.
You’ve got to be kidding.
Some software screening-software companies are rushing flawed products on to the market. They’re not going to say ‘sorry, our tool didn’t work’. The risk of a class action is real.
Do prospective candidates really need to upload a cover letter, a resumé and reply to 12 key selection criteria for an entry-level job? Are businesses going to treat executives to this shambolic mockery of professionalism?
Neither formatting, key words psychometrics or people analytics can measure inner experience. These so-called recruitment systems are broadly similar to online dating systems.
Experience, education and merit, plays no part in the magical symbiosis of big data and resume screening software. Organisations who flog this software call it disruptive. I call it dangerous and deluded.
The 1950s saw an explosion of technocratic possibility. Companies used IQ tests, math tests, vocabulary tests and professional-aptitude tests, to make the “right hire”.
Some of the tests were based on dodgy psychological theories, while others were designed to assess mental illness. Some are still used today. They measure conformity, not potential.
Those of us born after World War II can still travel back along the mystic bonds of memory, to a time when we used tools, rather than tools used us.
With 60 seconds of fuel left, off course and flying over a boulder field on the moon, the Commander of Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, did what no personality test thought he would do. He turned away from his instruments and looked out the window of the lunar module to find a safe place to land. How very human.
Today, depending on where the data was sourced, women, older workers and people with a disability, may also be excluded because they’re not representative of the larger population.
The world of work is the most human of activities and employs high-order mental processes.
It’s a cold, brave new world when AI can generate a resume and an AI-driven scanner can assess it without any human input at all.
The biggest risk resume screening tools pose is not machines taking workers’ jobs, but preventing them from getting employed at all.