Drew Harwell, The Washington Post; A face-scanning algorithm increasingly decides whether you deserve the job
HireVue claims it uses artificial intelligence to decide who’s best for a job. Outside experts call it ‘profoundly disturbing.’
"“It’s a profoundly disturbing development that we have proprietary
technology that claims to differentiate between a productive worker and a
worker who isn’t fit, based on their facial movements, their tone of
voice, their mannerisms,” said Meredith Whittaker, a co-founder of the AI Now Institute, a research center in New York...
Loren
Larsen, HireVue’s chief technology officer, said that such criticism is
uninformed and that “most AI researchers have a limited understanding”
of the psychology behind how workers think and behave...
“People
are rejected all the time based on how they look, their shoes, how they
tucked in their shirts and how ‘hot’ they are,” he told The Washington
Post. “Algorithms eliminate most of that in a way that hasn’t been
possible before.”...
HireVue’s growth, however, is running into some regulatory snags. In August, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed a first-in-the-nation law
that will force employers to tell job applicants how their AI-hiring
system works and get their consent before running them through the test.
The measure, which HireVue said it supports, will take effect Jan. 1."
