My professor told me AI would never replace judgement calls... until our hiring tool ghosted 40% of applicants

Back in March, my old ethics professor from community college said AI can't handle the 'human nuance' of hiring. I shrugged it off and used a free automated screening tool for a small job listing I posted on Craigslist in Austin. Within two days, it flagged 40 out of 100 applicants as 'low fit' because their resumes didn't match keywords like 'team player' or 'agile.' Turns out, the tool was trained on corporate job postings and completely ignored cover letters. I spent six hours manually reviewing the rejects and found three solid candidates. Has anyone else seen AI filters kill good applicants over something dumb like font choice?

3 comments

3 Comments

murphy.tessa13d ago

Did you check what dataset the tool was trained on before you ran it? In my experience, a lot of these free filters are built on really narrow data sets, like Fortune 500 resumes, not local gigs. I'd bet the font thing and keyword matching are just symptoms of that. Next time you might try manually sorting the rejects by education level or years of experience first instead of relying on a score. Even a simple spreadsheet filter for "has a valid email" and "lives in a 20 mile radius" can get you further than those black box tools. Your mileage may vary, but I always run a small batch of 10 test applicants through any new filter before I let it touch real people.

dylan_brown3013d ago

Went through something similar but way worse a few years back. My buddy ran a small HVAC business and used one of those free tools to screen for a dispatcher position. The thing straight up rejected anyone with a gap year or who listed a hobby like hiking instead of "data entry." We found out later the tool was trained on some corporate HR dataset from 2018 that only looked at job history with no gaps. Ended up missing a woman who ran her own dog walking business for a year and was the best candidate by far. The worst part was the tool didn't even tell us why it kicked people out, just gave a red X next to their name. I hate that whole black box approach, feels like you're gambling with peoples livelihoods for no reason.

mark_ward13d ago

Something a lot of folks miss is that these tools also penalize applicants who applied on their phone instead of a desktop. @dylan_brown30 mentioned the black box problem but the real kicker is how many good people get silently filtered out for something as dumb as submitting without a proper file naming convention.