AI hiring tools do not reduce recruitment bias, shows study

Artificial Intelligence (AI) hiring tools do not reduce bias or improve diversity, researchers said in a study. The research debunks the popular myth that AI-powered recruitment software and tools can boost diversity of new hires at a workplace.

Cambridge University experts who published their findings in the journal Philosophy and Technology said that companies are showing greater interest now to use AI to solve problems like interview and recruitment bias. However, they believe that the application of this AI when it analyses candidates' resumes or video is nothing but “pseudoscience”.

The study mentioned a 2020 survey of 500 human resource professionals from all over the world. Nearly 25% reported using AI for “talent acquisition”.

Kerry Mackereth, who is a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Gender Studies, told BBC that the “use of AI could actually be counterproductive”.

“These tools can’t be trained to only identify job-related characteristics and strip out gender and race from the hiring process, because the kinds of attributes we think are essential for being a good employee are inherently bound up with gender and race,” she said.

“There is a need to recognise the challenges in AI-systems that deliver biased results,” said Shubhangi Vashisth, Senior Principal Analyst (AI) at Gartner, adding that when “hiring tool that reinforces racial discrimination or entrenches prejudices against certain communities, oftentimes users and developers are not aware of the system’s process to reach the output”.

“This opacity increases the bias in datasets and decision systems,” said Vashisth. According to her, “bringing more diversity into the team through company culture can, however, mitigate the bias often developed by algorithms”.

Some companies have also found these tools problematic, the study notes. In 2018, for example, Amazon announced it had scrapped the development of an AI-powered recruitment engine because it could detect gender from CVs and discriminated against female applicants.

However, not every researcher agrees with the fact that AI creates bias in recruiting. For example, Frida Polli, a cognitive neuroscientist, and co-founder and CEO of AI platform, Pymetrics, wrote in a 2019 Harvard Business Review report that AI eliminates unconscious human bias, and it can assess the entire pipeline of candidates rather than forcing time-constrained humans to implement biased processes to shrink the pipeline from the start.