How AI is being used by businesses to eliminate bias in hiring processes

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a leading tool within many industries and its relevance is beginning to grow larger across many areas, including in hiring processes for businesses. According to US-Brazilian AI expert, Ben Goertzel, AI may be about to replace 80 per cent of current human jobs in the future.

AI's fraud detection capabilities, investment strategies optimisation and market trends predictions are currently already being used in the finance industry. It is also being utilised in the healthcare industry to develop personalised treatment plans, assist in diagnosis and analyse medical images.

When it comes to organisations seeking to hire new employees, human recruiters naturally have particular biases, even if it is unconsciously. That in turn can limit the pool of possible candidates for a vacancy and prevent somebody who may be perfectly qualified from advancing in the hiring process.

What AI allows companies to do with hiring processes is significantly reduce any personal biases through the tools being able to observe key data. Factors such as gender, age, skin colour and race do not become reasons to evaluate a candidate's suitability for a vacancy, instead, the qualifications and skills are the deciding factors.

AI chatbot tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT can aid the hiring process for companies by using the software's abilities to communicate and organise everything, making it easier to apply for vacancies and allowing businesses to cut down on costs in the application process.

Also, specialised AI tools which are able to detect fraudulent activity can assist businesses in finding below-par and deceitful applications. This allows recruiters to look purely and solely at qualifications and experiences and not resumes with the expected exaggerated commentary from candidates.

RemoteMore, which provides remote developers to companies, have been working to try and find a way in which AI can improve matchmaking between businesses and developers. The past two years have seen RemoteMore add new features to its platform including a job dashboard which allows employers to request developer profiles.

CEO and Co-founder of RemoteMore, Boris Krastev, spoke on what is in line for the company's future. He stated: "Integrating an AI-powered tool to ensure that the best-fit applicants reach our employer clients is the logical next step."

He further added: "These tools have grown in popularity in recent months. Our strategy is to be proactive when it comes to the adoption of new technologies that can revolutionize our industry."

Professional Diversity Network (PDN) last week increased its stake in RemoteMore by seven per cent to have roughly 73 per cent ownership of the company.

PDN CEO, Adam He, touched on the relevance of AI at this moment in time, saying: "AI-powered tools are some of the most impressive technological developments in recent years and their popularity is only growing."

The CEO of PDN also spoke on the hopes of AI being utilised for diversity during hiring processes, commenting: "The momentum in the AI space has been tremendous and we want to be able to leverage this technology within our diversity recruiting operations as well, thus providing the synergies we had envisioned when first acquiring an interest in RemoteMore."

Despite the enthusiasm around AI and its potential to help with diversity in hiring processes, there is talk of it actually being counterproductive in these scenarios. Dr Kerry Mackereth, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge's Centre for Gender Studies, told BBC News that the idea of AI reducing bias in hiring processes is "a myth".

She also touched on the shortcomings of AI features in these scenarios, commenting: "These tools can't be trained to only identify job-related characteristics and strip out gender and race from the hiring process, because the kinds of attributes we think are essential for being a good employee are inherently bound up with gender and race."

One of the world largest tech companies, Amazon, even scrapped an AI tool back in 2018 as it was deemed sexist against women, given that it was able to detect gender details on applicants' CVs. This led to some evaluations that AI hiring tools could have biases based on previous data from human preferences.

Although, technology has improved over the years since then, and more research has been undertaken so AI has a better chance of helping hiring processes. However, concerns and doubts will still exist as it is unknown how much an AI-generated tool can truly observe when analysing applicants' data.

Elsewhere, companies are looking to increase environmental, social and governance (ESG) results by using AI so that they have better practises and performance regarding numerous ethical issues. However, Levi faced strong backlash for this as the clothing company attempted to lift diversity and inclusivity by showcasing AI-generated models, instead of actually hiring real human diverse models.