Does HireVue Have the Wrong View?
Anyone who is, or has been, actively recruiting for internships or full-time positions alike should be familiar with the term ‘HireVue’, a virtual interviewing software that many companies have started incorporating into their recruiting process. For most of the jobs I applied for, I would usually find an email sitting in my inbox a few days later with a link to complete a virtual interview, powered by HireVue. Initially, I thought this was quite a novel idea. Being able to complete my interview at any time before a set deadline, as well as not needing to stress about being punctual and well-dressed to a live interview with another human, or god forbid, multiple other humans, resonated strongly with my inner (lazy and introverted) self.
However, I recently came across an article from the Washington Post that made me rethink my stance on this, especially after reading Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. As the article describes, HireVue is a “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.” But this is exactly what Bowker and Star mean when they say that “Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another,” which they immediately go on to describe as “not inherently a bad thing… not bad, but dangerous.” As Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute so eloquently summarizes: “It’s pseudoscience. It’s a license to discriminate.”
But there may be an even bigger concern. Predictions made by AI are only as useful as the data set upon which the AI was trained, which begs the question: How useful is HireVue’s data? As officials of the Electronic Privacy Information Center argued in their official complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, HireVue’s “biased, unprovable and not replicable results”, constitute a “major threat to American workers’ privacy and livelihoods.”
In a world that is slowly coming to terms with the profound consequences of the bias and discrimination that has been thoroughly ingrained into the foundation of our society, we must demand accountability and transparency from the systems that have the power to influence human lives. To use Bowker and Star’s words, “we have a moral and ethical agenda in our querying of these systems.” If not, we may soon find yet another ‘glass ceiling’ in our way.
References
Harwell, Drew. “A Face-Scanning Algorithm Increasingly Decides Whether You Deserve The Job”. Washington Post, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/ai-hiring-face-scanning-algorithm-increasingly-decides-whether-you-deserve-job/.
