PSA: My boss pushed an AI hiring tool that rejected my best candidate

Last month at our Columbus office, I watched an AI screener toss out a resume from a guy with 12 years of hands-on repair experience just because he didn't list Python. My boss kept insisting the algorithm was more 'objective' than human gut feeling, but I felt that was dead wrong. I asked the hiring team to manually review his application, and turns out he had run entire shop floors before. We hired him after a phone call, and he's been fixing our biggest client's issues for three weeks now. Has anyone else dealt with an AI filter killing a solid hire before you got a say?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicesingh1d ago

Used to be on the other side of this actually. I was all for AI tools because I figured they saved time and cut out bias. Then my own team lost a fantastic warehouse manager candidate because the system flagged him for having a 6 month gap in employment. Turns out he was caring for his sick mom, which no algorithm is ever going to pick up on. We hired him after a phone screen anyway and he turned out to be the best manager we had in years. So yeah, I get it now. That algorithm almost cost us a great person just because it couldn't read between the lines.

the_john1d ago

More objective than human gut feeling" - that's just a fancy way to say the boss didn't trust his own people.