The AI hiring industry is under scrutiny--but it'll be hard to fix

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate HireVue, an AI tool that helps companies figure out which workers to hire. HireVue is one of a growing number of artificial intelligence tools that companies use to assess job applicants. The algorithm analyzes video interviews, using everything from word choice to facial movements to figure out an "employability score" that is compared against that of other applicants. More than 100 companies have already used it on over a million applicants, according to the Washington Post. It's hard to predict which workers will be successful from things like facial expressions. Worse, critics worry that the algorithm is trained on limited data and so will be more likely to mark "traditional" applicants (white, male) as more employable.