Vent: I was dead wrong about that AI screening tool my job bought

So my company spent like $8k on this AI resume screening tool back in March, and I was the loudest person in the meeting calling it snake oil. I mean, I read all the horror stories about biased algorithms and figured it would just filter out half the candidates for dumb reasons. But then I watched it process 200 resumes for a senior dev role in like 10 minutes and flag the ones with actual relevant experience, something it took our HR team 3 days to do manually. And it caught things like portfolio links buried in the second page of a PDF which I totally would have missed. Now I'm stuck wondering if the ethical issues still outweigh the efficiency gains, or if I was just being a Luddite for no reason. Has anyone else seen these tools actually work well in practice, or am I just getting fooled by a fancy interface?

2 comments

2 Comments

zara5725d ago

@nina_jenkins made a really good point there about the keyword matching stuff. I've seen the same thing happen where the tool totally ignores a solid senior engineer just because their resume used "led" instead of "managed" in a project description. And you're right about the employment gaps too, a buddy of mine got passed over for a role because he took six months off to rehab a shoulder injury and the algorithm just flagged it as a red flag. It's impressive how fast it can sort through the pile but I'm starting to think speed doesn't fix the core problem of missing the forest for the trees. The ethical side feels like a nagging doubt that won't go away no matter how many seconds it saves.

nina_jenkins5d ago

Honestly, I gotta push back a bit here. An AI tool being fast doesn't mean it's actually good at picking people. It might just be good at matching keywords on a resume, which totally ignores things like job hopping, weird employment gaps, or candidates who have the skills but got laid off and are redoing their whole resume layout. Plus, no algorithm can tell if someone is a good cultural fit or has a solid work ethic from a PDF, so you're still gonna need a human to actually read the top picks anyway. Seems like the ethical stuff is still a real problem, not just 'fancy interface' hype.