As college seniors refine their applications in hopes of entering the workforce in the coming months, they must confront a growing threat: Artificial intelligence is taking over the hiring process.
Since the advent of ChatGPT and the artificial intelligence tech race, up to 42% of employers have begun using AI in the hiring process to improve recruiting. This may entail AI screening resumes, selecting candidates, and analyzing body language and vocal inflections in video interviews, according to the BBC.
Most Americans do not find this prospect promising. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 71% of U.S. adults oppose AI making final hiring decisions, and 41% oppose the use of AI in reviewing job applications.
However, ChatGPT and similar programs are a result of decades of prior AI development. Just like any other technology, AI evolved over years, gradually embedding itself into our daily lives, including the workforce and hiring process.
Google and LinkedIn, the sites most commonly associated with online job-searching and application, have used AI for almost as long as the sites themselves have existed. Google began using machine learning in 2001 to help its systems understand spelling mistakes. The company now uses AI for everything from helping with Google Translate to providing comprehensive results to search queries. LinkedIn began using AI around 2006 to develop its “People You May Know” function, an algorithm which connects people according to their interests, thus solidifying AI’s indirect influence over the online hiring process, according to Forbes.
AI is not new to the hiring process, and it’s here to stay. However, we ought to be cautious about AI replacing a crucial aspect of every hiring process: human judgement.
U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts emphasized this problem in his 2023 End of Year Report, in which he related the problem of artificial determinations to the U.S. judicial system — where human judgment matters the most.
“Machines cannot fully replace key actors in court,” Roberts said. “Nuance matters: Much can turn on a shaking hand, a quivering voice, a change of inflection, a bead of sweat, a moment’s hesitation, a fleeting break in eye contact.”
Roberts concluded most people still trust human judgment to “draw the right inferences” from small clues in human interaction that machines might not pick up on.
The same holds true for the hiring process. Any machine can gargle up and organize information based on the order of degrees, experience, or even the number of typos in a resume. A more sophisticated machine might even analyze body language and vocal inflection to make hiring decisions
But the hiring process is severely limited if it runs solely on data and algorithms. While convenient, letting a machine decide which candidates advance based solely on resume data, analysis, and raw numbers ignores crucial nuance about a person that cannot necessarily be captured on paper. This may result, for instance, in bad candidates with impressive resumes being favored while better-fit candidates with more modest resumes are rejected without either receiving face-to-face evaluations.
In-person interviews level the playing field of the hiring process. While resumes and data can give certain job candidates an edge, there remains a fundamentally human element of evaluating a person’s job fitness that AI can never replace.
An employer with virtue, perspective, and intuition can pick the right person for a job far better than the most sophisticated machine because machines cannot understand people by any metric beyond its own data. AI cannot base its judgement on any human experience or perspective of its own. Any attempt to run a hiring process without these necessities has failed from the start.
In the end, nothing can fully evaluate a person as well as another person. While one can generally accept AI as a result of our increasingly technological world, we must still hold the line by keeping AI’s role in the hiring process to a bare minimum. Leave the business of hiring people to people alone.
Elijah Guevara is a freshman studying the liberal arts.
