Harvard Business School reports that automated recruitment software ignores a lot of talent. According to the report, millions of job candidates in the United States can’t even get their foot in the door. Not because they are unfit for a position, but because the software automatically rejects applicants based on bad or overly simplistic criteria.
It is said that about 75 percent of people in the country use such software today, but this proportion is Fortune For 500 companies, it can rise to as much as 99 percent. While the technology used to review countless applications will undoubtedly save companies a lot of time, researchers say it leaves an alarming number of applicants on the shoreline. According to them, this situation has now caused a crisis in the labor market.
“Ironically, companies are constantly lamenting their inability to find talent while leaving millions on the margins of the labor market. This has led us to look for an explanation.” the authors of the report said. It was added that about 27 million workers in the United States remain “hidden” because of software, but the problem is similar in Germany and the United Kingdom.
One of the main reasons a company may lag behind is perhaps of an outstanding candidate, is simply that he has “disappeared from the labor market,” that is, he has not been employed or looking for a job for some time. This could mean, for example, applicants taking a break from writing a book or not working due to pregnancy.
As noted by the Wall Street Journal, some applicants were rejected because they did not have “computer programmers”. “their qualifications, even though the work in question was a simple data entry. Other companies admitted to making mistakes. IBM told WSJ that it had stopped adding college degree requirements to jobs when they were not specifically needed. “Strategically, our position was that if you had the skill, why would it matter how you got it?”
Nevertheless, the majority of candidates do not get in the door because they have not obtained a traditional qualification, even if the job is hardly rocket science, or the applicant is a genius self-taught.
What is perhaps surprising is that nine out of 10 executives interviewed by the researchers said they are well aware that automated systems exclude many good candidates from the interview. Some have said this is a concern and would like to change it, although researchers say it would require a redesign of the entire recording system.
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