The Legal and Ethical Implications of Using AI in Hiring

Digital innovations and advances in AI have produced a range of novel talent identification and assessment tools. Many of these technologies promise to help organizations improve their ability to find the right person for the right job, and screen out the wrong people for the wrong jobs, faster and cheaper than ever before. These tools put unprecedented power in the hands of organizations to pursue data-based human capital decisions. They also have the potential to democratize feedback, giving millions of job candidates data-driven insights on their strengths, development needs, and potential career and organizational fit. In particular, we have seen the rapid growth (and corresponding venture capital investment) in game-based assessments, bots for scraping social media postings, linguistic analysis of candidates' writing samples, and video-based interviews that utilize algorithms to analyze speech content, tone of voice, emotional states, nonverbal behaviors, and temperamental clues.