HireVue's systems have become pervasive for employers because they can lower recruiting costs and speed up turnaround time for new hires. Some colleges now instruct students on how to impress the hidden algorithms: In the FTC filing, EPIC lawyers quote a guide from the University of Maryland business school, which tells interviewees, "Robots compare you against existing success stories; they don't look for out-of-the-box candidates."

A prominent rights group is urging the Federal Trade Commission to take on the recruiting-technology company HireVue, arguing the firm has turned to unfair and deceptive trade practices in its use of face-scanning technology to assess job candidates' "employability." The Electronic Privacy Information Center, known as EPIC, on Wednesday filed an official complaint calling on the FTC to investigate HireVue's business practices, saying the company's use of unproven artificial-intelligence systems that scan people's faces and voices constituted a wide-scale threat to American workers. HireVue's "AI-driven assessments," which more than 100 employers have used on more than a million job candidates, use video interviews to analyze hundreds of thousands of data points related to a person's speaking voice, word selection and facial movements. The system then creates a computer-generated estimate of the candidates' skills and behaviors, including their "willingness to learn" and "personal stability." Candidates aren't told their scores, but employers can use those reports to decide whom to hire or disregard. The the Utah-based company was the subject of a Washington Post report last month, in which AI researchers criticized its technology as "profoundly disturbing" and "opaque."