Brave New Recruitment: Are We Entering a New Era of Fairer Interview Assessments?

Speaker:  Prof Andreas Leibbrandt

Affiliaiton: Monash University

Location: Room 201, Michie Building (#09), St Lucia Campus

Zoom: https://uqz.zoom.us/j/82603079317

Abstract: Rapid technological innovation has revolutionised recruitment, reshaping both job interviews and the broader pathways to employment. Asynchronous interviews, where job applicants submit responses via an online platform without interacting with an interviewer, are replacing more traditional face-to-face job interviews. At the same time, AI algorithms are now widely used to assess job interviews. In this paper, we use a field experimental approach to comprehensively study how these new technologies affect job entry. Over 3,000 applicants for tech jobs are randomized into asynchronous audio or video interviews, live online interviews and a control group. Their job interviews are then assessed by professional recruiters and a leading AI-based recruitment platform. We find that asynchronous interviews cause a large decline in application continuation and that this decline is significantly larger for women than men.. In terms of assessments, we find that the AI assessment tool scores female and underrepresented racial minorities higher than white men, whereas the opposite holds for human evaluators. We also track our applicants’ labor market outcomes using LinkedIn and find that the AI assessment tool predicts subsequent employment success significantly better and that human recruiters are subject to a number of biases. Our findings provide the first evidence that the recent technological advancements are transforming the “entry gates” to employment: fewer applicants queue up; the queue contains a smaller fraction of women; but a larger share of women and racial minorities who do apply are more likely to pass.