Untagging Recruitment
Curriculums are Based on What We Achieved in the Past. Are They Still Relevant?
The World Economic Forum revealed that by 2025, 50% of the skills we currently possess will be irrelevant, and a staggering 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t even been invented yet.
Persisting in the practice of filtering and selecting candidates based on conventional criteria like job titles, descriptions, keywords, tasks, skills, and competencies ties us to a past we should outgrow. Instead of embracing the skills that will propel us into the future, we risk being caught in a cycle of replicating outdated practices.
Curriculums Based on Words
The detrimental impact of word-based tagging is evident in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) recruitment tools that heavily rely on keywords to assess CVs. A telling case is Amazon's experience: their undisclosed AI recruiting tool favoured certain words, which led to gender bias and discriminatory outcomes. The flaw emerged because Amazon's models were trained on resumes spanning a decade, predominantly submitted by men due to the tech industry's gender skew. Consequently, the system learned to favour male candidates, even downgrading resumes mentioning "women's," or graduates from all-women's colleges. While Amazon attempted to rectify this bias, it highlighted the potential for future discriminatory patterns.
CVs are nothing more than collections of words. In the tech industry, large corporations receive an overwhelming number of CVs, and so they resort to automated AI-driven CV sifting to find candidates with “the right” keywords.
Aware of this trend, job-seekers optimise their resumes for search engines by including in-demand keywords. This is an unfortunate shift towards conforming to the system rather than the other way around. YouTube videos even provide guidance on optimising your resume by highlighting the keywords favoured by AI in CV screening. Examples include:
- OKR (Objectives and Key Results)
- CTR (Click Through Rate)
- A/B testing
- GTM (Go to Market)
- MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
These terms attract the CV-screening AI’s attention. Other recommendations include using keywords from the job description to increase the chances of being selected by the AI.
Essentially, we now tailor our resumes to cater to Artificial Intelligence and Applicant Tracking Systems. How can we UNTAG recruitment?