Have Advances in Technology Distracted HR From the Fundamentals of Worker Selection and Development?

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.– Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

Hundreds of billions of investment dollars are driving the advancements in technology into every corner of our lives, including the selection and development of workers. Predictably, the emphasis often seems more on the technology and the money it can make for investors than the practicality for the end-user or those it effects.

It is not just the refrigerators that talk to your grocery store, or watches that talk to the phone in your pocket. Wall Street, with an accumulating mountain of cash, can drive any idea to fabricate a “trend” that often dissipates as quickly as it emerges, sometimes leaving disruption in the wake but yields a return for investors. For investors it is the means to an end. To many, it may negatively affect their life and their future.

In the 1990’s, investors started to look at the National Security Agency’s and Central Intelligence Agency’s “key-word search” capabilities used to scan millions of documents from around the world for specific words and phrases to expand their intelligence gathering reach. They saw applications of this technology in the civilian world, including scanning the mounds of resumes and employment applications employers had to filter in order to find a few new-hires. On the surface, this seemed to be a godsend.

Soon employers and employment candidates saw what the developers of this technology did not. The technology first had to count on employers having accurately designed job descriptions in consistent formats, using standardized terms, words and phrases to describe pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest. The fact was reality couldn’t have been farther from this, with job descriptions written 50 years prior, written precisely for someone the employer wanted to hire (not so reflective of the actual job requirements), or cut & pasted from a handy library resource.

Next, this technology had to rely the applicant knowing the right words and phrases to describe their own pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest to the employer for the algorithm to recognize a closeness or match. In truth, most candidates even knew less about the difference between a skill and ability, knowledge and a trait, having “experience with” versus being “acquainted with,” or being “fluent” in a topic or having a passing knowledge.

Nevertheless, this technology, with all of its short-comings, stormed the market. Many who lost their jobs in 2008, as with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, had not written a resume or filled in a job application for 20 or 30 years, let alone were aware of how key-word search worked and the need to be precise in describing a life of work in terms used by employers which were evolving and who probably changed their own management line-up and company strategy. No one really knows how many highly skilled and perfect matches have seen their careers derailed by this technology, robbing the worker of the job they wanted and the employer of the worker they needed.

Today, while the matching technology is still in use, more and more employers recognize its shortcomings and have developed “work-arounds” to try to ensure more qualified candidates are fairly and more objectively measured. Some have thrown out the idea of key-word candidate screening but not before the years of damage was done.

Other technologies continue to be driven into every aspect of life, including human resources and training. Concern has been expressed about the potential for loss of privacy with using some of these such as fitness trackers that track and make available the location of the users and shares the data it collects with third-party brokers who share the information with whoever will buy it. The military discovered fitness trackers revealed the location of its overseas troops and stopped or limited its use.

Some employers forced candidates and workers to turn over passwords to their private social-media lives, and many found things dredged from the distant past – perhaps not job-relevant – that they had to act upon. Some employers made generalizations of a candidate or employee’s character based on, in some cases, lapses in judgment while in the private company of friends or family, thinking they are sharing the moment with a private group.

One emerging “trend” is the use of Artificial Intelligence to scour the universe of social media, public records and private, but shared, data on employees and candidates. AI learns from scouring the data it is presented, which includes erroneous and inaccurate information and entrenched biases. Will this technology disqualify even more qualified candidates? Will legal challenges limit or halt the use of this technology in employment practices but not before the horse has left the barn and the damage done?

Ironically, while the future of AI social-media mining is being heralded as the future of human resources, more and more employers – unhappy with disqualifying suspiciously qualified candidates for the job openings they need filled – are turning to manual selection of non-traditional candidates such as older workers, ex-inmates, former drug addicted citizens and the physically challenged.

Reports have stated that AI in employment is muddying both sides of the equation. From the job-candidate’s side, AI is being used to generate bogus job openings to lure unsuspecting candidates into providing personal information and extracting fees. Some scams involve individuals fraudulently applying for remote, non-existent IT jobs at big firms to the access financial, private and proprietary information of their clients and employees. From the employer’s perspective, AI is being used to create phony interview candidates and resumes, wasting the employer’s time and resources. AI is even being used to emulate upper-management personnel’s voices, ordering funds be transferred to the crook’s accounts, to create phony invoices and email instructions, and direct personnel to perform actions internally threatening operations. The future of AI in human resource management decisions looks cloudy and risky, at best.

According to an HR Dive article entitled, “More Than Half of Leaders Who Laid Off Workers Due to AI Admit to Screwing Up,” “About 4 in 10 business leaders have laid off employees as a result of deploying AI — and of those, 55% admit they made the wrong decisions about it, according to a recent survey of more than 1,000 business leaders by organizational design and planning software platform Orgvue.”

Human resource professionals should have learned by now to wait before fully committing to new technology from their other experiences with new apps and the latest hardware. Who hasn’t been creeped out by a pop-up advertisement for a product or service searched a few days prior? Or watched, out of curiosity, a Spanish-speaking television program only to see commercials appearing a few days later in Spanish during English broadcasts even though the viewer only knows English? It wouldn’t hurt to be deliberately cynical if for no other reason than to protect the company’s interests.

AI is not for everyone and everything as we have been pressured to believe. Understanding completely the problem to be solved to know if the AI solution is better than a human-based response can prevent wasted resources and disastrous results. For larger scale AI platforms, a new ISO standard ISO/IEC 42001 establishes guardrails, protections, checks and measures to hopefully ensure a smoother adoption and predictable outcome. For smaller, more discrete applications of AI it might be worthwhile to review the guidance to understand better the risks and rewards of not implementing it right.

If you are more concerned about the basic building blocks of worker screening and development based on job-validated data rather than subjective, sometimes erroneous, generalizations, check out Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach to see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues.