The so-called Great Resignation, a mass restructuring of the workforce that coincided with the coronavirus pandemic, continues to loom large for companies, with surveys of corporate leadership showing staffing issues remain among the most pressing near-term risks. Many have turned to AI to bulk up their recruitment muscle, despite perennial warnings from regulators and experts of the potential for algorithms to effectively learn from and then magnify human biases. Proponents, though, argue that removing the human element can actually help. Output from AI can be readily audited, and computers stripped of some of the hidden biases that can lurk in a person's mind. A computer doesn't have a hometown, didn't go to college and doesn't have hobbies, so won't unconsciously warm to a friendly candidate the way a real recruiter might. Our Morning Risk Report features insights and news on governance, risk and compliance.

Companies are making more use of algorithmic hiring tools to screen a flood of job applicants during the coronavirus pandemic amid questions about whether they introduce new forms of bias into the early vetting process. The tools are designed to more efficiently filter out candidates that don't meet certain job-related criteria, like prior work experience, and to recruit potential hires via their online profiles. Businesses like HireVue offer biometric scanning tools that give applicant feedback based on facial expressions, while others like Pymetrics use behavioral tests to home in on ideal candidates. Companies including Colgate-Palmolive Co., McDonald's Corp., Boston Consulting Group Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and Kraft Heinz Co. are using them at a time when 21 million people in the U.S. were without jobs and seeking employment in May, according to the Labor Department. Job candidates might be unable or unwilling to apply and interview in person because of rules limiting social gatherings, said Monica Snyder, a workplace privacy attorney at Fisher Phillips in Boston.

When it comes to recruiting, many people focus on the problems technology can create. Even in this newsletter, we've talked about the headaches caused by applicant tracking systems (ATS), for example. Yet, a slew of companies are working to introduce more tech in the hiring process, and they say it will be a net benefit. "It's not like technology is not being used, but it's being used in such a janky way," said Frida Polli, who is CEO and co-founder of Pymetrics, which uses neuroscience and artificial intelligence to match applicants to the right positions. Like an ATS, their system can serve as a tool for companies to comb through the initial onslaught of applicants.

It's becoming ubiquitous and invisible,

The online games were easy–until I got to challenge number six. I was applying for a job at Unilever, the consumer-goods behemoth behind Axe Body Spray and Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise. I was halfway through a series of puzzles designed to test 90 cognitive and emotional traits, everything from my memory and planning speed to my focus and appetite for risk. A machine had already scrutinized my application to determine whether I was fit to reach even this test-taking stage. Now, as I sat at my laptop, scratching my head over a probability game that involved wagering varying amounts of virtual money on whether I could hit my space bar five times within three seconds or 60 times within 12 seconds, an algorithm custom-built for Unilever analyzed my every click. I furiously stabbed at my keyboard, my chances of joining one of the world's largest employers literally at my fingertips.

Employee turnover at DocuSign was already low. "We have a healthy attrition rate," says Senior Director of Recruiting Susan Ross. When people do leave, she continues, they're usually in the company's sales lead-generation department at the San Francisco headquarters. However low turnover was, though, recruiting still found room for improvement--$1 million worth of improvement, in fact. By implementing technology that predicts whether job prospects will leave before the end of year one, Ross says, the company was able to avoid making roughly 11 bad hires, thereby saving more than $1 million in salary.

Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke to the founders of two behavioral design start-ups, Kate Glazebrook of Applied and Frida Polli of Pymetrics, for the latest on the algorithmic design revolution that is transforming hiring practices. Tell us more about your tools. POLLI We use gamified neuroscience and A.I. to help companies understand what cognitive and emotional traits predict success in different roles, and help them match people to those roles. We test the algorithms to ensure that women and men (as well as people of different ethnic backgrounds) are getting similar scores, and if they aren't, we adjust the inputs until they are. GLAZEBROOK Applied is the first hiring platform designed entirely around the psychology of decision-making that helps firms make recruitment decisions smart (more predictive of performance), fair (less biased) and easy.

Identify the traits of your top performing employees and hire people like them, but without the discrimanatory bias of traditional recruiting. That's the promise of Pymetrics, an artificial intelligence startup that today announced $8 million in new funding onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Pymetrics' goal is "making the world a fairer place" by dismantling hiring discrimination like sexism, racism, ageism and classism. Anyone can play the Pymetrics test games and get scored on different hireable traits, plus see suggestions for job types they'd be great at. You can watch my interview with Pymetrics' CEO Frida Polli below: A company's all-star employees play Pymetrics' set of games that assess things like memory, emotion detection, risk-taking, fairness and focus.

Unilever wants to be a global leader when it comes to using artificial intelligence for hiring. For the past year, the Dutch-British consumer-goods giant Unilever has been using artificial intelligence to hire entry-level employees, and the company says it has dramatically increased diversity and cost-efficiency. "We were going to campus the same way I was recruited over 20 years ago," Mike Clementi, VP of human resources for North America, told Business Insider. "Inherently, something didn't feel right." Unilever is one of the world's leading consumer-goods conglomerates, with billion-dollar brands like Axe, Dove, and Lipton, and it has 170,000 employees worldwide. Clementi said the company needed to find a way to rejuvenate itself, and transforming new talent recruitment was one way to do so.