www.reuters.com
Open in
urlscan Pro
99.84.37.84
Public Scan
URL:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showe...
Submission: On February 09 via manual from US — Scanned from US
Submission: On February 09 via manual from US — Scanned from US
Form analysis 1 forms found in the DOM
<form>
<p class="NewsletterSignup-label-1xvVJ">Reuters News Now</p>
<p class="NewsletterSignup-description-Ed-MY">Subscribe to our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox.</p>
<div><input class="NewsletterSignup-email-3nj-u" type="email" name="email" spellcheck="false" required="" placeholder="Enter email address"><button class="NewsletterSignup-submit-1jVHY" type="submit" disabled="">Submit</button></div>
</form>Text Content
Discover Thomson Reuters Directory of sitesLoginContactSupport World Business Markets Breakingviews Video More for-phone-onlyfor-tablet-portrait-upfor-tablet-landscape-upfor-desktop-upfor-wide-desktop-up Retail Invalid DateInvalid DateUpdated 4 years ago AMAZON SCRAPS SECRET AI RECRUITING TOOL THAT SHOWED BIAS AGAINST WOMEN By Jeffrey Dastin 8 Min Read SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc's AMZN.O machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women. The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters. Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said. “Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of the people said. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.” But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way. That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools. Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory, the people said. The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said. Amazon declined to comment on the technology’s challenges, but said the tool “was never used by Amazon recruiters to evaluate candidates.” The company did not elaborate further. It did not dispute that recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the recruiting engine. The company's experiment, which Reuters is first to report, offers a case study in the limitations of machine learning. It also serves as a lesson to the growing list of large companies including Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc HLT.N and Goldman Sachs Group Inc GS.N that are looking to automate portions of the hiring process. Some 55 percent of U.S. human resources managers said artificial intelligence, or AI, would be a regular part of their work within the next five years, according to a 2017 survey by talent software firm CareerBuilder. Slideshow ( 6 images ) Employers have long dreamed of harnessing technology to widen the hiring net and reduce reliance on subjective opinions of human recruiters. But computer scientists such as Nihar Shah, who teaches machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, say there is still much work to do. “How to ensure that the algorithm is fair, how to make sure the algorithm is really interpretable and explainable - that’s still quite far off,” he said. MASCULINE LANGUAGE Amazon’s experiment began at a pivotal moment for the world’s largest online retailer. Machine learning was gaining traction in the technology world, thanks to a surge in low-cost computing power. And Amazon’s Human Resources department was about to embark on a hiring spree: Since June 2015, the company’s global headcount has more than tripled to 575,700 workers, regulatory filings show. So it set up a team in Amazon’s Edinburgh engineering hub that grew to around a dozen people. Their goal was to develop AI that could rapidly crawl the web and spot candidates worth recruiting, the people familiar with the matter said. The group created 500 computer models focused on specific job functions and locations. They taught each to recognize some 50,000 terms that showed up on past candidates’ resumes. The algorithms learned to assign little significance to skills that were common across IT applicants, such as the ability to write various computer codes, the people said. Instead, the technology favored candidates who described themselves using verbs more commonly found on male engineers’ resumes, such as “executed” and “captured,” one person said. Gender bias was not the only issue. Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs, the people said. With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said. THE PROBLEM, OR THE CURE? Other companies are forging ahead, underscoring the eagerness of employers to harness AI for hiring. Kevin Parker, chief executive of HireVue, a startup near Salt Lake City, said automation is helping firms look beyond the same recruiting networks upon which they have long relied. His firm analyzes candidates’ speech and facial expressions in video interviews to reduce reliance on resumes. "You weren’t going back to the same old places; you weren’t going back to just Ivy League schools," Parker said. His company's customers include Unilever PLC ULVR.L and Hilton. Slideshow ( 6 images ) Goldman Sachs has created its own resume analysis tool that tries to match candidates with the division where they would be the “best fit,” the company said. Microsoft Corp's MSFT.O LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, has gone further. It offers employers algorithmic rankings of candidates based on their fit for job postings on its site. Still, John Jersin, vice president of LinkedIn Talent Solutions, said the service is not a replacement for traditional recruiters. “I certainly would not trust any AI system today to make a hiring decision on its own,” he said. “The technology is just not ready yet.” Some activists say they are concerned about transparency in AI. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently challenging a law that allows criminal prosecution of researchers and journalists who test hiring websites’ algorithms for discrimination. “We are increasingly focusing on algorithmic fairness as an issue,” said Rachel Goodman, a staff attorney with the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU. Still, Goodman and other critics of AI acknowledged it could be exceedingly difficult to sue an employer over automated hiring: Job candidates might never know it was being used. As for Amazon, the company managed to salvage some of what it learned from its failed AI experiment. It now uses a “much-watered down version” of the recruiting engine to help with some rudimentary chores, including culling duplicate candidate profiles from databases, one of the people familiar with the project said. Another said a new team in Edinburgh has been formed to give automated employment screening another try, this time with a focus on diversity. Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Marla Dickerson Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. Trending Stories Reuters News Now Subscribe to our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. Submit * Apps * Newsletters * Advertise with Us * Advertising Guidelines * Cookies * Terms of Use * Privacy * Do Not Sell My Personal Information All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. © 2023 Reuters. All Rights Reserved. for-phone-onlyfor-tablet-portrait-upfor-tablet-landscape-upfor-desktop-upfor-wide-desktop-up CCPA RIGHT TO OPT-OUT OF THE SALE OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION If you are a California consumer, you have the right, at any time, to direct a business that sells your personal information to third parties to not sell your personal information. This right is referred to as the right to opt-out. You may exercise your right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information through Reuters.com by clicking here. You do not have to create an account to exercise this right. Please note that opting-out may not mean you will stop seeing advertisements. Additionally, in the event you opt-out under CCPA, but do not opt out of interest-based advertising more generally, you may still receive advertisements tailored to your interests based upon your Personal Information. For more information about your rights as a California consumer and to learn more about our use of interest-based advertising and additional opt-out choices, please see our Privacy Statement. When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link. Allow All MANAGE CONSENT PREFERENCES STRICTLY NECESSARY COOKIES Always Active Strictly Necessary Cookies These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information. * FUNCTIONAL COOKIES Always Active These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalisation. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then some or all of these services may not function properly. SALE OF PERSONAL DATA Always Active Sale of Personal Data Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link. If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences. * PERFORMANCE COOKIES Always Active These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance. * TARGETING COOKIES Always Active These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising. Reject All Confirm My Choices Back Button Back PERFORMANCE COOKIES Vendor Search Search Icon Filter Icon Clear Filters Information storage and access Apply Consent Leg.Interest All Consent Allowed Select All Vendors Select All Vendors All Consent Allowed Reject All Confirm My Choices