Amazon's Recruiting AI Highlights Limitations of Using Technology in Hiring

Many have praised artificial intelligence as a great tool for employee hiring because it can hide demographics and avoid the biases of hiring managers, reports the Washington Post . However, a recent Reuters report about a project at Amazon to use artificial intelligence to recruit workers found the tool was trained to evaluate applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted over 10 years, most of which came from men. According to Reuters, the system "taught itself that male candidates were preferable," and penalized resumes that included the word "women's" or graduates from two all-women's colleges. The tool, which was scrapped by the start of 2017, was "never used by Amazon recruiters to evaluate candidates," according to a company spokeswoman. Researchers say the study is a good example of what to watch for when using artificial intelligence in hiring. "This is the biggest risk of A.I. in recruiting, that it will it perpetuate all the biases we've had," said Josh Bersin, an analyst who studies workplace technology and advises companies. Brian Kropp, group vice president for Gartner's human resources practice, added that he has 10 to 20 examples of how employers have tried to create algorithms to eliminate bias in the hiring process, but "all they've done is institutionalized biases that existed before or created new ones."