Employers need to do more to guard against the impact of AI bias in recruitment with women the most likely to lose out on jobs as a result of shortcomings in existing systems, experts have told an Ibec HR conference in Dublin.
The ongoing roll-out of AI will be hugely impactful but its application in hiring to date continues to highlight its dangers as well as benefits, Prof Joseph Fuller, who specialises in Management Practice at Harvard Business School, told the conference. Many well qualified candidates, among them many women, excluded from recruitment processes at early stages because of arbitrary filters, he added.
He said women become more important than ever in the workforce as companies seek to hire more graduates and those with better social skills, both categories in which women score more highly.
Factors like significant absences from the workforce were routinely used to exclude candidates in the early stages of recruitment processes relying on AI systems.
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“If candidates have a gap in their work history of six months, they will be dropped from consideration for 50 per cent of jobs in the US and they will be ranked lower for half of the remaining positions,” he said.
“An absence of six months might be viewed as a lack of eagerness to work, a lack of energy or drive or an indication that people they previously worked with weren’t lining up to hire them but it also takes in women like my wife who was put on six months bed rest after the birth of twins and those who care for a terminally ill parent, or child or spouse.
“The analysis we did suggests that some of these highly specific and detailed requirements set by employers are creating some of the shortages they then complain about.”
Prof Sana Khareghani, the Former Head of UK Gov Office for Artificial Intelligence, said bias can be addressed in AI driven processes even if it can require some thought and effort but the lack of women in driving AI development remains a more fundamental problem.
She said more regulation is required to provide guardrails around the application and use of AI in workplaces and society in general.
“We absolutely need more regulation,” she said. “We are still in a place where we need to protect our citizens and society and yet with things like Chat GPT we are currently using the world as a sandbox to see what might happen.”
Ibec’s executive director of employer relations, Maeve McElwee, said the latest evidence suggests application of AI technologies has stagnated somewhat among Irish businesses with some taking more time than expected to settle on what the goal for it is.
“We’ve heard a lot today about how important it is that organisations have a strategy in place, an understanding of what it is they want to achieve with AI. We are seeing lots of organisations in pilot phases, trying to learn about it, what it is, what it can do, and trying to upskill people a little bit but to really benefit from it, there nees to be more work done around what they want to do and then how are they going to do it.”
