an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed “baseball” or “basketball” – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned “softball” – typically women – were downgraded.
Marginalised groups often “fall through the cracks, because they have different hobbies, they went to different schools”
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Your company requiring video submissions for a fucking application is the easiest “this company is batshit insane and there’s no possibility working for them could ever be worth it” red flag I’ve ever seen.
Yep. I literally told a company there was no legitimate legal reason they could possibly want this, and good luck with their search. What better way to practice racism, sexism, and ageism in the hiring process?
There’s also that.
But purely on the premise of “you should take the time to record a video merely for the pleasure of maybe having us look at your application”, their expectations are way out of whack.
This isn’t like when Google put scavenger hunts or puzzles or whatever in ads and gave job offers to people who solved them. The people who got hired by those ads were following through out of curiosity/the fun of solving the problems, and that wasn’t the main/only way to get a job. It’s just a new absurd demand trying to push the threshold of what’s a legitimate ask.
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I dunno what country you’re in, but in my country you are required by law to have a valid reason to reject a job candidate. That reason can be pretty simple, such as “your application was not as strong as other candidates” but you need to be able to back that claim up if you’re challenged (and you can be challenged on it).
The recommended approach is to have a list of selection criteria, and carefully consider each one then write it down and keep a record of the decision for a while, incase you end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Candidates have the right to ask why they were unsuccessful (and they should ask - to find out what they can do better to improve their chances next time. As a hiring manager I would note down anyone who asks and consider offering them a job in the future, bypassing the normal recruitment process).
I rank each criteria from one to ten, then disregard the worst scoring candidates until I have a short list that I can compare directly (at that point, I wouldn’t worry too much about numbers. You are allowed to say “you were a great candidate, but we had multiple great candidates and had to pick one. Sorry”.
If your selection criteria includes “they need to wear nice clothes” then you’re treading on very dangerous territory and could be breaking the law. The damages here are commonly six months pay at the salary of the position they applied for, and can also include a court order for you not to be involved in the hiring process going forward.
It’s perfectly reasonable to require someone to dress well if they have a customer facing role… but that requirement should be implemented at work and not during the job interview. I’m well aware that a lot of hiring managers rely heavily on these things to make their decision but they should not be doing that. It’s not as bad as picking someone because they’re a straight white male candidate (which is also very common), but it’s still a bad policy.
You consider applicants who show up to a bank/office type job interview in sweatpants and a T-shirt with a skeleton making a rude gesture?
Please tell me the country where declining to offer that candidate a job would be illegal.
There is also the question/prep element. Something like, “tell me about a time you used x tool” or “what would you do if faced with y challenge”. No longer than 30s needed to respond, but very obvious when someone has been generous on their resume.
Once again, this video recording tool is an option that I think makes sense for jobs where it relates to the required skills. Don’t videoconference? Work from home? Never have to interact with customers or other external parties? Probably not the tool I would use in hiring.
Australia. It’s not clearly illegal but it’s dangerous territory. Candidates have a general right to be treated as equals and you need to reject someone for reasons that are relevant to the job position.
Something that can easily be changed, like a shirt, might not be OK. ANZ bank (a massive bank with several hundred billion dollars in assets they manage), for example, requires customer facing staff to wear a branded uniform but back at the office? You can wear whatever you want. When they changed their dress code years ago to no-longer require a suit/tie the CEO deliberately wore ugly clothes for a while to set an example.
Obviously no candidates are expected to turn up to an interview in their uniform - they don’t have a uniform yet. And if someone can wear a Marilyn Manson shirt in the office, then why not also at the interview?
The bank I’m with is even more relaxed - even customer facing staff can wear anything they want. Sure, if it’s offensive they’ll be told to wear something else, but that’s a conversation I’d be having with the candidate rather than a reason to reject their application. I might reject them if I don’t like their response.
You’re focusing on the dress part. There’s still the actual questions and overall sense of calm and comfort a person has in communicating on video, a skill that directly maps to this specific job.
I can’t imagine a front-of-house bank teller would need to have these skills. Maybe a question like, “tell me about a time a customer was unhappy and how you handled the situation?”. In which case, I imagine some people would like the chance to think about it at their leisure and record once or twice, and rewatch it before submitting to make sure they’re happy with it.
Being recorded and interacting with someone in person are hugely different. Even
First of all, a person would give nonverbal feedback.
Secondly, there is all manner of body language that could be used for emphasis that doesn’t make sense doing to a camera.
What legal reason(s) do you have for needing to see their appearance when making a decision on whether to hire them? You may have some, such as requiring a professional appearance. These need to be spelled out in the job requirements. It also opens the doors to claims of illegal discrimination, since this will be on full display. In the US, that includes race, age, and gender. Having a required video can also reveal protected classes like familial status and religion, depending on what’s in the background.
Whether an action is “Legal” is almost always dependent on context, and the lawyers/courts involved. A common tactic by racist nightclubs is to set a dress code, particularly on shoes. The argument is they aren’t refusing entry based on race, but on clothing. But the unauthorized shoes are the ones commonly worn by people of the race they’re discriminating against. Different courts have made different rulings on whether this (and similar actions) constitute racial discrimination.
By that logic, in-person interviews should also be illegal.
I go back to my comment somewhere in this thread about some symphony orchestras doing double blind auditions. If that is your position, then your issue is with general hiring practices, not with this video submissions in particular.
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You should hate it as a manager. You’re filtering out every single quality candidate because only a deranged nut job would even consider such an unhinged request. Submitting a video, in and of itself, proves they are not worth hiring.
You don’t need to process every candidate. Just randomly take 5%, or 1%, or .001%, and do a real hiring process. Anything at all is better than requiring a video application.
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I don’t really get why people are up in arms at this stuff. I hate the idea of doing these type of interviews, sure. But my grad program had 3k applications, 1k video interviews, 300 in person interviews, and only 100 actual roles. How the fuck else do they expect people to handle the sheer size of applications in management/HR roles?
I have to assume most of the comments are from people who have never worked in positions that deal with this sort of thing on volumes of this scale.
One of my jobs in college was an admin assistant with the department that reviewed international candidates for post grad positions. Your experience makes 100% sense to me. Scheduling live interviews across the globe was an absolute nightmare. Video submissions would have been fantastic. Candidates could have recorded on their own time, not some ungodly early AM hour to accommodate the US hiring panel. And especially for the ones for whom English wasn’t their first language, it would have given them time to prepare and re-record as many times as necessary to get a submission they were satisfied with.
Holding the position that video interviews are fine but pre-recorded video is not is baffling to me. I get some would feel it’s a performance they would be uncomfortable with, but I mainly see it as an interaction that I as candidate can exert more control over versua a live video interview.
Yeah lol that’s because you don’t seem to have any empathy for the people you are hiring. Why is it important if you don’t care about it? Easy answer is it isn’t.
What part of this makes me unempathetic? I am truly baffled by your position. When used correctly, this tool gives an applicant the control to put their best foot forward.
You are selecting for the people privileged enough to know how or spend the time figuring out how to record and send video. Even if someone has used teams every day for presentations, it’s easy to avoid using recording features when videoconferencing is all live.
If your workplace creates pre-recorded videos for office use, then sure I guess it’s a skill you can select for.
I’m also selecting for people privileged enough to have a college degree, sometimes even a post grad or doctorate. So yeah, being able to use software that the pandemic made pretty much necessary in this industry and in universities is something I’m ok with filtering on.
Others in this thread have used bank teller as a use case. It probably doesn’t make sense to use this sort of video tool for a bank teller hiring process because 1) tellers don’t work on video, they’re in person and 2) there’s going to be a handful of applicants and they are likely local so an in-person interview is less of a logistics challenge.
If you care about my appearance more than my ability to do the job I wouldn’t want to work with you anyway.
I literally roll out of bed most mornings without looking in rhe mirror, walk up to my home office and start work. And I’m one of the best employees at my office.
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Dress Professional is code for, I feel the need to control you. We really need a complete flip in how we view work. This shit is old, can’t believe this attitude still persists post covid.
I tried one of these video screening interviews once. It’s very unfriendly to the neuro-atypical. Gave up about halfway through, because I was on the verge of a stress-induced panic attack and figured the job wasn’t worth it with this kind of hoop to apply.
I’m sorry it caused you a panic attack. However,
it may be unfriendly to some neuro-atypical people. You know that, I know that.
this particular job requires being on camera or communicating in person for large parts of every workday. If a person finds this stressful, neurodiverse or not, it’s probably not the job for them. Using video screening can be seen as an application tool, think a programming position having a person write a piece of demo code or a university professor being asked to submit published peer-reviewed articles or a video demo of one of their lectures.
I’ll say it again just so a person doesn’t have to reread this entire thread, this is a tool option. It would probably be ineffective and even detrimental to use it in interviewing for a job that doesn’t have a lot of customer interaction and communication by videoconference. I fully agree that it could filter out qualified candidates if the job requirements are totally unrelated. I could see my train engineer uncle letting out a stringg of expletives if someone tried to tell him this was the hiring process he had to go through to work alone on a train 99% of his workday.
I get weeding out the people who answer the question incorrectly.
You seem to place a lot of emphasis on appearance though which is shitty. Hopefully AI will help with that sort of bias as it’s pretty irrelevant. I get if you’re a boomer that appearance is important, but its also the easiest thing to change. If you pass all the other criteria appearance shouldn’t matter as you can easily just buy a suit/comb your hair.
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I am amused by the amount of hate youbare getting for pretty non controversial opinions.
Feels just like reddit 😁