With so many qualified individuals seeking jobs in today’s world, how are employers supposed to find the best candidates for their available positions? Several recruiting companies—Eightfold being the focus—have begun to implement artificial intelligence systems to examine the resumes of potential employees. Rather than looking only for key words or explicit skills, these advanced systems make assumptions based on specific information. For example, Ashutosh Garg, Eightfold’s chief executive, noted that about 90 percent of software engineers from a software company Intuit know the Java programming language. With this knowledge, the A.I. system will make the connection that any candidate who lists on their resume “former Intuit employee,” or something of the like, knows Java. Even without this skill explicitly listed on the document, the system will infer that the candidate possesses it.
With the help of these A.I. recruiting systems, companies could filter through resumes with much greater speed. Furthermore, the system would get more information out of a resume than a human job recruiter would, and a company could therefore locate qualified candidates who may not have such conventional experience or qualifications. In other words, people who may otherwise be overlooked will have a better chance at gaining employment. Recruiting in this manner would help to diversify the workforce, providing a wider range of perspectives among employees.
On the down side, this recruitment style may cause a reduction in wages. Since employers would not have to work as hard to find qualified individuals, there would be a loss of competition. While this is a positive change for employers, it’s not so positive for the job candidates. The system may deem someone fresh out of college to be as equally qualified as someone with a master’s degree and twenty years of experience. Therefore, this recruitment style may be disadvantageous to conventional candidates.
As a college student who will be looking for employment in several years, the thought of a computer calculating my work potential rather than a human is a little unsettling. While Eightfold claims its system will gather more information and understand candidates better than a human would, I can’t help but wonder what qualities—good and bad—it could unintentionally overlook.
Beyond this potential fault, resumes should tell employers more than just skills and experience: A resume reflects how well an individual knows himself or herself. This is an important thing to be considered when searching for candidates. People should be both familiar with their own skills and able to articulate these in writing, not rely on a computer to make connections for employers. If we do not expect individuals to know their strengths, how can we expect them to perform exceptionally as employees?
While these advanced recruiting systems have many pros—acceleration of recruitment, inclusion of candidates, diversification of workforce, etc.—they can never fully replace humans in the realm of job recruitment. Human judgement and perception, while inherently biased, are essential to understanding other people, especially as potential employees. If we allow job recruitment, a process so intimately tied to human interactions, to be completed by a computer program, what else will we be willing to sacrifice for the sake of speed and financial gain?
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