For months, Amazon has carried out a plan to lay off the company’s recruiters. According to several leaked internal documents, many of those jobs may have been eliminated because the company has been experimenting for some time with a new artificial intelligence technology that is basically able to select what it believes will be the best employees for the company.
Goodbye recruiters, hello algorithms. According to an internal document from October 2021 labeled “Amazon confidential,” the tech giant has been working to offload some of its recruiters’ tasks to AI bots capable of predicting which job applicants will succeed in a given role. And all this without the participation of a human being.
Last year, this technology was tested in very specific cases, but since then, it has been used to screen job applicants for positions ranging from software engineers to managers or technicians.
How does it work? Amazon’s artificial intelligence technology, known internally as Automated Applicant Assessment, or AAE, predicts which job applicants have the most potential to succeed in certain jobs and then accelerates them to an interview. As Recode points out, it works by finding the middle part of a Venn diagram between current Amazon employees and job applicants applying for similar jobs.
They already did it and it went wrong. Actually, Amazon has been experimenting with similar technologies for a decade, but failed miserably by making the algorithms discriminate against women. The goal was to mechanize the search for top talent, and that recruiting tool gave candidates ratings from one to five stars, just like buyers rate products on Amazon.
But in 2015, the company realized that its system did not qualify candidates in a gender-neutral manner, preferring men over women. It penalized resumes that included the word “feminine.” And it lowered the qualification of the graduates in exclusive women’s universities. Now, according to the leaked document, the new AI is protected against biases based on race and gender.
The desire to automate everything. Automation has been a pillar of Amazon’s strategy in both warehouses and sales channels. The company has invested heavily over the years in trying to automate different types of work. In 2012, it acquired a warehouse robotics company called Kiva, whose robots reduced the need for workers to walk miles on the job, but at the same time increased the pace and repetitiveness of their work.
In his corporate wing, he implemented an initiative called “hands off the wheel” that took inventory ordering and other responsibilities out of the hands of employees in the retail division.
Even in productivity. Approaches such as the musculoskeletal algorithm that we have discussed in Magnet indicate that the company is seeking to robotize the worker more and more. The objective of this system is to incorporate job rotation plans within the center for employees to move different groups of muscles and tendons so that they adapt to different environments throughout the day, improving their employability and productivity.
However, security experts criticize that ideas like these can dehumanize workers.
Image: Unsplash