Agenda

Andreas Leibbrandt (Monash University) - Brave New Recruitment: Are we Entering a New Era of Fair and Predictive Interviewing?

Abstract:

Hiring decisions often hinge on soft skills, such as communication, adaptability, and composure, which are difficult to assess objectively and susceptible to human bias. This study explores whether AI can improve the reliability and fairness of soft skill-based assessments. We conduct a large-scale recruitment study and employ both an AI interview tool used by over 60% of Fortune 100 companies and experienced professional recruiters to independently evaluate the job interviews of 1,019 job applicants. We then track these applicants’ employment outcomes 12 months later using LinkedIn. We find that AI outperforms human recruiters by a factor larger than three in predicting applicants’ future career success by assessing their job interviews alone without any other information such as resumes. In addition, we find that AI produces significantly more diverse shortlists, with higher interview scores assigned to women and underrepresented minorities, resulting in 20% more women and 13% more underrepresented minorities in the top-ranked candidate pool. Despite this, applicants, including women and underrepresented minorities, have unfavorable views of AI evaluation and may form more negative perception of employers who decide to use it. These results suggest that AI may be able to meaningfully detect soft skills, offering not only scalable and less biased assessments, but also an emergent capacity to recognize human potential through words. However, employers who choose to implement AI evaluations would need to win over skeptical applicants.