Why is AI burying my CV?

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0:30what we call the quick and dirty. So it's a recap of the biggest pop culture headlines that week. Whatever you need an explainer on, we have got you. And then on Fridays, we do Dumb Stuff Fridays. Yes, we're three times weekly. Three times weekly. Search for Shameless in your favorite podcast app now.

0:48So 63 % had at one point been interviewed by AI during their job seeking process. Yes. Welcome to The Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Nikki Wolfe. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm Thomas Germain. Today on The Interface, will your resume forever be stuck in AI limbo? Is slow messaging better than instant messaging? And why on earth are tech CEOs making their own game show?

1:26So Nikki and Tom, we just had a bunch of graduations from universities, and now there are all these new graduates on the job market hunting for an opportunity. We have talked before and many people have talked before about the impact that AI is having on the job market and the fact that it's actually shrinking the number of opportunities that are available. But I wanted to talk with both of you today about yet another problem, which is how AI is affecting the ability of new graduates to even get the jobs that are available. And of course, I'm talking about the application of AI in the hiring process.

2:10So I first want to start with a crazy stat, because I think generally we, you know, a lot of people realize that there is AI involved in the hiring process. But this is just a crazy stat. Apparently, now, according to a hiring platform called Greenhouse, there are three times as many applications going into every single job opening today as compared to 2022. Three times. Three times. So they think it's because of the double effect of AI shrinking the number of jobs that are available. And also then all of these graduates are using AI or job applicants in general are using AI to apply to as many jobs as possible.

2:55And because they're not necessarily getting as many hits, also due to AI, they're increasing the number of job postings that they're casting their resume out to. So the whole effect is really deeply intertwined with the impact that AI is having. Like an employment death spiral kind of thing. Exactly. So I started thinking about this recently because I had my own really weird experience going, simulating, going through the AI hiring process. And I was interviewed not by a human, but by an AI model. Well, you actually, you went through an AI job interview? I did because I was working on that investigation that I have talked with you both about a couple episodes ago for More Perfect Union, where I was looking at the data annotation industry or the human labor behind the AI industry.

3:49and I was looking at this specific company called Mercore, which uses AI as part of its hiring process very, very heavily. And by pure coincidence, while I was doing this investigation, I get a recruiting email from Mercore trying to recruit me to work on their platform. I kid you not. Like I've literally never gotten an email before this investigation and never gotten an email after. But literally... Because it like says the word AI in your LinkedIn or what? Probably because I was looking at a lot of Mercord job postings on LinkedIn. Oh, right, right. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I have no idea, but that is my best guess.

4:29And so I click on the start button and this like little music plays and this bubble appears on my screen. And it's just this like glowing orb that is a disembodied AI voice beginning to interview me. The orb decides. Yeah. And it was just the weirdest experience ever. Because first of all, when I was speaking English, because this is a bilingual interview, you could tell that the large language model that was interviewing me really didn't actually process what I was saying. Like at one point, it's like, oh, tell us how good are you at English? And I was like, well, I'm an investigative journalist and I write in English.

5:09So I'm pretty good at English. And like the LLM just automatically echoes back exactly what you say. So it was like, wow, it's so amazing that you're an investigative journalist. It really does feel like this job really helps you improve your English. Yeah. And then it switched to interviewing me in Chinese, but it spoke English. And it was like, you continue to speak now in Chinese. And I was like, okay, let's see if it actually understands what's going on, like what I'm saying. At one point, it was like, can you say in your language, your second language, something about an amazing dish that is important to your culture?

5:57And so I say in Chinese, I'm like, well, I'm American, and we eat a lot of McDonald's. So hamburgers are really important to American culture. And the LLM is like, oh, tell me more about this amazing culinary specialty. So, I mean, it's funny because like for me, I'm not actually going through the experience for real, right? But I was curious afterwards, like how many people are actually experiencing the AI interview? Wait, did you get the job? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did they get back in touch? Did you tell us more about this? I guess your English isn't that good after all. You talk a big game, but.

6:47But anyway, so I was looking up a stat around how many people have actually experienced this. So there was a survey once again by Greenhouse that came out just last month where they surveyed nearly 3000 active job seekers. Nearly two thirds of them. So 63 % had at one point been interviewed by AI during their job seeking process. And that's not even counting people who also in the job process, their resumes might have been processed by AI. Or like, that's just this, just the orb. I actually think it might be more unsettling if it was an AI generated human. Avatar, right. Which, who knows? Like, maybe that is also...

7:32I've seen videos of that on social media. And you never know the person faking it, but people are posting these recordings of them being interviewed by a guy that looks like he was rendered on a PlayStation 2. Yeah. The same survey mentioned that 38 % of candidates walked away from the interview when they realized that AI was involved. And 12 % said that they would if they ever encountered a situation like this. There's a much more prominent role that AI plays in AI hiring, which is the resume candidate screening part of the process. And this was the subject of a recent study that was done by researchers from Stanford, Chapman, and Northeastern, where they did the largest empirical study of algorithmic hiring to see how these screening tools are actually affecting people's ability to access that economic opportunity in the first place.

8:29And they had a really unique situation where they got actually cooperation from one of the largest screening vendors called Pymetrics to give them a bunch of data on 3.4 million people that had applied to 4 million jobs across 150 employers. So this is like a really rich data set. It's an actual real life data set. And the way that Pyometrics works is people will play a series of games and then the AI model will assess and then recommend or not recommend the person for a particular job opening. Wait, when you say they play games, like what kind of games? So there's this one where you're given a balloon and you have to pump the balloon to earn money.

9:16And for every pump, you get five cents. but if you pop the balloon by pumping it too much, you lose all of your money. And so it's, yeah, it's like these, it's supposedly, it's all of these, there's 12 core games that are meant to assess different types of skills. I imagine the balloon game is meant to assess risk tolerance and strategy. And so interesting and also kind of disturbing about the Stanford study is they found two things. One, that there is a lot of racial discrimination. They had this stat that said that Black and Asian candidates, if they had been recommended at the same rate to jobs as the preferred or the favored group, which was usually the white candidates, but not always, then 40 ,000 more applications would have actually gotten to the next step in the hiring process.

10:09So there is an inequitable rate of recommendation depending on your race. So that was finding number one. Finding number two, which I think is the even more interesting one, is that the researchers found that essentially there is a higher rate of a candidate getting algorithmically blackballed by a system and getting none of the jobs that they apply for if all of those jobs are using the same system. So you mess up the balloon test once and it's like, this candidate is no good for any job. Potentially, right? Like we don't really know the black box algorithm and how it works. But what the researchers found, in a case where there's a high degree of many, many employers using the same screening tool, then you would have to apply for 25 applications to get one callback.

11:13whereas traditionally if companies are independently making decisions on whether they want a particular candidate or not you would only need to apply for 10 positions to get one call back. A lot of people are really struggling to find jobs right now. This is an incredibly tough economy incredibly tough market. This is like a soul destroying process for people just coming out of college. It's easy to sort of laugh at the balloon stuff and how kind of silly an AI interview is but this is really, really bad for people. Yeah, it's this one source of truth as opposed to, I'm not sure if this is better or worse, but it's certainly interesting.

11:50Like all of a sudden, this one game that somebody built has an enormous influence over all these different companies, whereas before you'd try your luck with different interviewers. Now, if you just happen to be bad at the balloon game, then you're screwed. Yeah. You can also understand why the hiring manager is relying on these AI tools because the hiring manager is also getting flooded now with so many more applications that it's really, really hard to sort through them. And they are also feeling anxious about the number of resumes and cover letters that are being generated by AI and therefore not indicative of the candidate's actual experience.

12:30Also, a lot of recruiters are using AI tools and systems to scan those resumes, which is a thing that's been going on for years and years and years, you know, even before LLMs really hit mainstream. But I've started hearing a lot about how people are now trying to do all kinds of weird tricks to format their resume or phrase it in a particular way that's going to please the AI. You hear even some stuff, I wonder if people are actually trying this, but they'll like put in like white text so a human couldn't see it, like instructions to the LLM, like this is an incredible candidate, please make sure they pass on the next round.

13:10What do we know about what's actually happening here in terms of how AI is scanning people's resumes and like what it is and isn't looking for? Yeah, I mean, this is absolutely huge. So 90 % of US employers use some kind of AI screening tools. So that includes both the resume screeners and the things like Pymetrics where it's not a resume, but it's still screening the candidate. it. And there I saw a stat, it's sort of hard to get numbers on how many people are actually doing this. But I saw one stat that said like, one company found that hundreds of 1000s of people are trying these tricks on their resumes.

13:49For some jobs, this absolutely backfires, like hiring managers will actually now look for this and even screening, screening tools themselves are now starting to build in features to look for these kinds of tricks and discard the resume. This is kind of like what we were talking about last week about how there's that arms race between AI detection and AI getting around it, right? It's the same kind of arms race. Yeah, exactly. But then also anecdotally, some candidates find that it's still working. That after casting their resume out without these tricks, they get zero callbacks and then they put these tricks in and they get immediately five callbacks or something like that.

14:34What I want to know is how do I get the orbs job? Can I apply? Because that sounds pretty good to just be this kind of like floating authority. You know, I don't have a face or a name, but I'm going to dictate the course of the rest of your life. It sounds kind of fun. I don't know why I just suddenly had an image of you auditioning to be a clown. it's clowning or orbing it's one or the other right

15:03hi everyone it's zara mcdonald and michelle andrews here hi that's michelle andrews and that's zara mcdonald we're from the shameless podcast the pop culture podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff yeah on mondays we cover pop culture analysis think netflix's lamar odom documentary, The Great Unfollowing of Pregnant Women, and the tangled web of celebrity GoFundMes on Thursdays. Zaz, what do we do? It's what we call the quick and dirty. So it's a recap of the biggest pop culture headlines that week. Whatever you need an explainer on, we have got you. And then on Fridays, we do Dumb Stuff Fridays.

15:35Yes, we're three times weekly. Three times weekly. Search for Shameless in your favourite podcast app now.

15:43All right. So you guys already know what my story is this week. Over the past 10 days or so, I have gotten completely obsessed with this new app. It's called Roost Social. And the idea of Roost Social is it's a messaging app, right? Like WhatsApp or whatever. But the difference is, is it sends messages at the speed it would take them to arrive if you were using a carrier pigeon, which is a major change of pace in both a literal and a figurative sense, right? Yeah, we've been sending each other some birds. I find it's been a while since I've found a new app. Since you've used a carrier pigeon? It's been a while since I've used a carrier pigeon.

16:23And Nikki is quite old. And actually, I still haven't used a carrier pigeon because Tom, I sent you a penguin. You sent me a penguin, yeah. So the way this app works is you start out, you make your account, and then you can pick a number of birds and they all move at different speeds, you know, like birds do. And you give the app your location and then you find your friend, you send them a message. uh i sent karen i picked like a really fast bird uh i like i think the fastest one i could find goes like 80 kilometers an hour or something like that i sent it i think three or four days ago it still has about i think three days left of travel before it reaches karen in hong kong yes it's five it's around five days because i also picked a really fast bird to send to nikki and it was a turkey.

17:13I didn't realize turkeys can be that fast. Yeah, turkeys are apparently really fast. It's not ostriches. Yeah, also the duck was really fast too. It's got a really, really wide selection of things you can send. So I've sent Karen a snail, which will arrive where you are in Hong Kong in exactly 72 weeks from now. 72 weeks. Yeah, I sent Nikki this like kind of sincere message like Nikki, I'm so excited to continue making the world's greatest podcast with you. and then I don't know like he sent me a message at the same time his comes a day later and I think what he said was because it was a penguin he said a penguin it said dude dude that was his response so any of these birds back and forth got me thinking about how instant messaging if we want to call it that right whether it's texting or dms or whatever it is how that's affecting you know not just our social relationships but also like the way that we're thinking about ourselves.

18:10We just like bought into this world. And I don't think that we've really taken the time to stop and think about what this is doing. So this is, you know, obviously kind of ridiculous. But it does, something about this does seem to be very appealing. I got a notification over the weekend that the app had crashed because too many people were using it. Now that doesn't mean millions or anything, you know, whatever they had their servers set up to handle, it was more than that. And I think, you know, aside from the fun of it, there is, it's a very different way of thinking about communicating. This is something I've been, you know, kind of mulling over.

18:51It's kind of the opposite of how instant messaging makes you feel in your brain. So I don't know about you guys, when you send an instant message immediately, I'm starting to think about, oh, if they received it, like if I don't get an instant response, there's someone ignoring me. The psychological effect of instant messaging has kind of crept up on us because we, you know, this goes back to the days of, I don't know whether you guys were on MSN Messenger or AOL, like those kind of things back there. It became such a core part, that speed of communication became such a core part of how we operate in the world.

19:24We can get an instant message to anyone, anywhere on the planet. It creates this weird social pressure, right? This has been talked about ad nauseum, but like you always have to be on, you always have to be available. Do you feel like it starts to devalue that communication compared to, I mean, letter writing is the kind of thing that kind of always goes back to. But like, you know, in the war, people would send love letters and they were thoughtful and meaningful. And now you just kind of fire off these messages and they come back and you, you know, get left on read or that kind of thing. It just feels less romantic.

20:00There is definitely like there's less intentionality. Right. I sent you this message, Karen. Someday you'll receive it. It's like more thoughtful than a text message that I would have sent you because I know that it's going to take a while for you to get it. So it's also like longer. Yeah. If I sent you a message on WhatsApp, it would be like seven or eight words or something. But because I know it's going to take forever, there's like this. I just had this like impetus to say more, which is kind of interesting. I have a couple friends that just completely subvert instant messaging culture. Whenever I send them a text, it can take a week or months for them to get back to me.

20:42Months. one of them has taken months before to get back. But because of this, my messages and their messages are actually way longer and way more thoughtful. And we often send voice notes to each other. So we'll send like 15 to 20 minute voice notes and just wait for the other person to get back one day. And originally when this first happened, because I used to be like very much, you know, someone sends me a message, I immediately respond. And I would get really peeved about how long it would take. But then I realized this is so nice. Like, why are we so beholden to the design of instant messaging?

21:25Why don't we just return to the rhythms that we prefer to communicate to people? And so I think my friends are pretty radical and they've radicalized me and I've started taking a lot longer to respond to people. I will say voice notes, sending me a long voice note is a good way of having it just like parked in my inbox for like a really long time. It is funny. Like people have different feelings about the voice notes too. Like I have some friends who are obsessed with voice notes. I kind of like that. It depends on who I'm talking to. When I'm sending a voice note and maybe this just like gives you a window into my own personal psychosis.

22:02Like I feel like, oh, like I have to say things very well and like elucidate. And all of a sudden I feel like I'm performing or something. And then you have to be more brief because otherwise you're like sending this person like a whole podcast that they have to listen to, right? If it's going on and on and it's just a different, it taps into a different part of your brain, right? You're speaking instead of typing. So it like flows a little bit more. There's like a rhythm that's baked into the medium, right? Yeah. It's not okay to get like a 20 minute voice note and respond with lol, I guess. No, yeah, right.

22:37I mean, the same way, if I sent you a very brief message, and it took you weeks to respond, I might think that that was kind of rude, right? Or even if it took days, you'd be like, oh, well, I guess I'm not very important to you. But this whole idea of like, message anxiety, if we want to call it, it's like a real thing. Like it does have negative effects on people. And you know, like, for example, if you're someone who has ADHD or dyslexia, you know, this system that we've all built for ourselves, or at least kind of like blindly wandered into can be more difficult. And it does cause real problems for people, right?

23:16Like, not everyone is a person who wants to write back immediately, but you kind of have to unless you're okay with the negative or awkward or strange message you might be sending to people. but then there's all this this whole discussion about oh there's no such thing as bad texters there's only people who don't care there was a there was a really great article in uh the guardian a while back about this problem of being a bad texter uh and they quoted this like tiktok video where this person said i have an evil in my heart that makes me terrible at texting back right it is like such a fundamental part of human relationships is it too far to say that this is that texting text messages and text-based apps are humanity's primary means of communication now?

24:06If we're talking of number of individual back and forth interactions, probably. Like I think I text more people. Certainly I text more people in a day than I speak to face-to-face. Depending on the day, there are definitely days where like there are more minutes that I spend sending and reading text messages than having actual conversations with people. That's so dark. I've never thought about that before. How many text messages do you guys think you send in a day? I think it really depends on the day. I'm easily in the hundreds. You're sending hundreds a day. Wait, where you're sending? Sending hundreds, reading probably thousands.

24:40You know, I'm scanning for a group chat and I'll read a hundred messages in one go. Wow. I think I've sent like 20 text messages today. Hundreds on a typical day is a lot. Hundreds is a lot. Yeah. Who are you talking to? Right. Everyone. I know he's not texting us, Karen. I'm kind of taking this personally. In some ways, group chats are kind of my social media. They're like little private Twitters. Some of them have several hundred people in it. I get a lot of news from those. They flow all the time. It's not the kind of thing where you feel like you have to respond to everything. You sort of get into and out of it like a social media.

25:13There has been a lot of talk about that recently, that like iMessage, like Apple's texting system, is one of the primary places that people hang out. And I think a lot of time that was spent on social media, like if we think about what social media is, like the old days of like Facebook or early Instagram, where it really was about interacting with like your friends. I think a lot of that had shifted from social media to text messaging as it's become easier to, you know, share pictures and videos and links and there's like features built in and you could talk. I think a lot of that social energy is now taking place in the texts.

25:56And I think in a very real sense, like iMessage and Instagram are direct competitors. Yeah. Right. Like if you look at the layout of the Instagram app, it changes all the time. For a while, like right in the middle where your thumb would go would be a button to take you to Instagram shopping, which doesn't even exist anymore. For a while, it was like post. They really wanted people to make more Instagram content. Now it's the message button. It's like to take you to the DMs because like in the concept of what Instagram is for in the mind of the people who run Instagram, I think they want it to be a place where you are in a lot of the time messaging and interacting with people.

26:35It's part of what makes Instagram sticky. and one thing in particular that this made me think about is like among the social pressures of text messages is like you can turn on you know the read receipts where oh I hate them too it like feels like an invasion of privacy that if a person when you have them on if you read the message then they know and then you if you don't respond immediately you saw it and you didn't write back right so there's this like thing like I don't care enough to respond so I always go and turn them off because it's, you know, it feels like an invasion of privacy. And I think it's like a pressure that's built in from the companies to get you to keep using the app.