How racist robots are being used in recruitment

Since graduating from a US university four years ago, Kevin Carballo has lost count of the number of times he has applied for a job only to receive a swift, automated rejection email - sometimes just hours after applying. Like many job seekers around the world, Mr Carballo's applications are increasingly being screened by algorithms built to automatically flag attractive applicants to hiring managers. "There's no way to apply for a job these days without being analysed by some sort of automated system," said Mr Carballo, 27, who is latino and the first member of his family to go to university. "It feels like shooting in the dark while being blindfolded - there's just no way for me to tell my full story when a machine is assessing me," Mr Carballo, who hoped to get work experience at a law firm before applying to law school, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. From Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs that assess an applicant's facial expressions during a video interview, to resume screening platforms predicting job performance, the AI recruitment industry is valued at more than $500 million (£350 million).