Chatbot

Looking for a new job? Nervous about that first preliminary interview? Thinking about diversity, age, gender, etc and how it will play out?. Forget about it. You will speak with a robot (er, chatbot) that will be "bias free". Devoid of human influence. The chatbot interview will be totally objective and only ask performance based questions. Very cool (I think) and I wonder who at HR hires the robot?

(Bill Taylor/CEO)

"Eyal Grayevsky has a plan

to make Silicon Valley more diverse. Mya Systems, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that he cofounded in 2012, has built its strategy on a single idea: Reduce the influence of humans in recruiting. “We’re taking out bias from the process,” he tells me.

They’re doing this with Mya, an intelligent chatbot that, much like a recruiter, interviews and evaluates job candidates. Grayevsky argues that unlike some recruiters, Mya is programmed to ask objective, performance-based questions and avoid the subconscious judgments that a human might make. When Mya evaluates a candidate’s resume, it doesn’t look at the candidate’s appearance, gender, or name. “We’re stripping all of those components away,” Grayevsky adds.

Though Grayevsky declined to name the companies that use Mya, he says that it’s currently used by several large recruitment agencies, all of which employ the chatbot for “that initial conversation.” It filters applicants against the job’s core requirements, learns more about their educational and professional backgrounds, informs them about the specifics of the role, measures their level of interest, and answers questions on company policies and culture.

Everyone knows that the tech industry has a diversity problem, but attempts to rectify these imbalances have been disappointingly slow. Though some firms have blamed the “pipeline problem,” much of the slowness stems from recruiting. Hiring is an extremely complex, high-volume process, where human recruiters—with their all-too-human biases—ferret out the best candidates for a role. In part, this system is responsible for the uniform tech workforce we have today. But what if you could reinvent hiring—and remove people? A number of startups are building tools and platforms that recruit using artificial intelligence, which they claim will take human bias largely out of the recruitment process..." Full Story at Wired