How To Make Ethical Use Of AI In The Hiring Process

Global corporate investments in AI are projected to double to around $110 billion over the next two years. One of the main areas of application for organizational AI is recruitment (e.g., staffing, hiring, employee selection, etc.), not least because human recruiters waste a great deal of time entering data, sorting through resumes, and making imprecise inferences about candidates' talent and potential. Across countries and industries, big firms, such as IKEA, Unilever, Intel and Vodafone rely on algorithmic decision-making in their recruitment processes. It is noteworthy that many of the most popular traditional hiring methods have very low accuracy, and attempts to evaluate other people's job suitability are typically contaminated by the usual stereotypes and prejudices that undermine human objectivity and reduce our ability to understand others. Unsurprisingly, many recruiters see technological innovations, such as machine-learning algorithms, as a big time saver, and emerging academic research suggests that AI can also increase organizations' efforts to accurately predict employee job performance and select the right person for the right role, as well as increasing fairness, transparency, and consistency.