Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Workplace Diversity?

Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Workplace Diversity?

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Recruitment tools based on artificial intelligence have become increasingly popular as a method to remove possible discrimination when hiring new employees. Despite its wide use, academics and researchers have teamed up to disprove the effectiveness of such tools.

New research highlights a growing market in AI-powered recruitment tools, used to process high volumes of job applicants, that claim to bypass human bias and remove discrimination from hiring. These AI tools reduce race and gender to trivial data points, and often rely on personality analysis that is “automated pseudoscience,” according to Cambridge researchers.

Sciencedaily.com reports that academics have teamed up with computing students to debunk use of AI in recruitment by building a version of the kinds of software increasingly used by HR teams. The researchers were able to demonstrates how random changes in clothing or lighting give radically different personality readings that could prove make-or-break for a generation of job seekers.

The Cambridge team say that use of AI to narrow candidate pools may ultimately increase uniformity rather than diversity in the workforce, as the technology is calibrated to search for the employer’s fantasy “ideal candidate.”

Additionally, as algorithms are honed using past data, they argue that candidates considered the best fit are likely to end up those that most closely resembling the current workforce.

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