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How fair does AI seem in job interviews?
Many companies rely on AI for recruitment. A new study shows that job applicants mostly trust the avatars conducting their interviews – but only until they receive a rejection. How fair this decision is perceived to be depends on the avatars’ identity characteristics. The test subjects who felt treated the most unfairly were not those who differed most from the avatar – but rather those who matched it in either gender or skin color.
Companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence in their hiring processes. It’s not just CVs that are evaluated automatically. AI tools can also conduct job interviews – usually in the form of avatars, which are animated characters – and make hiring decisions. An important reason for this, aside from saving time, is that AI is said to be less biased than humans. “What has been largely overlooked so far is that we all unconsciously react to the avatars’ appearance, even when we know we’re talking to a machine. That’s why a conversation with artificial intelligence becomes a social interaction as soon as it behaves like a human,” says Enkelejda Kasneci, professor of Human-Centered Technologies for Learning at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
A team of researchers from TUM and Lund University therefore investigated how applicants perceive AI decisions in job interviews depending on the avatar’s appearance. For the study, approximately 220 participants from Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States conducted a short simulated job interview for a fictional position in a company’s customer support department. They were interviewed by a photorealistic avatar capable of reacting to their answers and asking follow-up questions in a human-like manner. The research team had programmed four variants to embody the AI. The avatars were either female or male and had either dark or light skin. The participants’ eye movements were monitored using eye-tracking technology. After the interview, they completed a questionnaire.
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