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Robo-Interviewing
The Ethics of the Future
Application Process

Issue – Robo-interviewing Ethics

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Timothy Doty

Professor Billings

ITM-209-04

25-01-18

Robo-Interviewing- Ethics and Human Rights

Introduction

As we humans progress deeper into the evolution of technology, bigger and sometimes better

technological equipment arises. The more people that populate the Earth, the more jobs will need to be

offered. Unfortunately, this just is not the case in the 21st century. As more people are going into the job

market, the amount of jobs being created simply cannot keep up. Companies are thousands and

thousands of applications daily making it hard to find the right candidate for the job and more often

than not the “right” person is not selected because application reviewers cannot physically keep up with

the application being turned in. Robo-interviewing has been around for about 3 years now and experts

are diving into the ethics of the interviewing process. On the surface, robo-interviewing seems like a

fantastic, efficient, and effective way of covering the most amount of ground when choosing a

candidate. Three things can be pointed out to why Robo-interviewing is just not the right way to go due

the ethics of what really happens in a robo-interview, the way that robo-interviewing strips the rights of

the man and woman, and just plain and simple, technology WILL fail at some point making this process

ineffective because of the natural faults of tech.

Poor Ethics

The ethics of the situation is clear. The way that companies go about handling a robo-interview

are those to be desired. At HireVue, the company behind the technology making it possible to conduct

an interview with a robot, they have constructed an algorithm to ensure that the candidate is the
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perfect candidate for the job. The problem is that the robot is looking for the “perfect” person. That

perfect person simply does not exist and this causing the robo-interviewing process to be much more

technically difficult than previously presumed. Using an idea called microexpressions, the robot

conducting the interview can sense nervousness, complex vocabulary, disgust or surprise and all general

emotions. The machine can also pick up key words when a person speaking for example, the word

analysis can produce an image of a white man is the computer’s database and will associate that word

with a white man being interviewed. Each candidate is interviewed and the interviewed once completed

is ranked from 0-100 and these records are reported back to the recruiters who are humans. The

interpersonal factor is stripped from the situation which makes this process ineffective to find the right

person for the job and not the perfect person. There is a difference in the right person and the perfect

person because many people can master the robo-interviewing process and t=can manipulate the

system being set into place by companies using this technology.

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As presented on the graph above, the average length of an interview in the United States is about 23

minutes long. With this technology being recently in development, experts at HireVue and other experts

studying the technology of robo-interviewing say that number can be cut down by nearly 5 minutes. This

is not a good thing because, an interview should not be a set length. Employer should have the freedom

the get to know and connect with their potential employees on personal level something a computer

cannot do.

Stripping of Humanity

This system of robo-interviewing is a process that makes the interviewee seems insignificant.

Look at it this way, all people who apply for a job deserve that interpersonal connection with their

future employer, something that a person to person interview can provide. In an article written by PBS,

it is stated that the interview process is a software the interviewee has to download and then run into

order to conduct their interview with the robot, “no one from employer has spoken to you. No manager

has taken time to answer your questions. No one at the employer company knows you exist. How is this

anyway to hire a potential employee? With the robo-interviewing process, real-life people become a

number in a list of hundreds. This robo-interview process removes all humanity from what really makes

an interview a true interview on a personal level. An interview should not be algorithms and computing

numbers, an interview should be interpersonal, person to person, learning about the future employee

as well as learning about the future company.

Technological Failure

Throughout the history of technological advancement, many new and innovative technologies

have been developed and put to use in everyday life, but from new technology comes new problems.

Much of what is used technologically today often has its kinks that need to be worked out. Many of the

new iPhones and other brilliant new techs that are being released seem to struggle at the launch.
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The line graph above explains how much technological information is created annually. Over 2,000

Billion gigabytes of information are produced yearly and that number is expected to increased by over

2,000%. This information can be useful to show how much technology is being used in the world today

and where there’s tech there’s technical difficulty. Much of what is created digitally is saved into a

universal database whether that be hard drives for computers and gaming consoles that get corrupted

after a while and many other databases are established to keep information safe, but these databases

are prone to failure. These databases are set up for the robo-interviewing process and keep records of

each person being interviewed in a large base that when a person is selected they are tagged and

submitted to be hired. This database could be corrupted causing all of the data and previous interviews

to be deleted.

Conclusion
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Technology will continue to become move advanced as the world and science is progressed through the

generations leading to more things like the robo-interviewing process. But there are things that we as

people should look out for in technology, things that computers cannot do which are having morals and

understand the basic concept of ethics. Computers do what they are programmed to do, but one day,

people will not have that privilege anymore.

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Works Cited

- Ask the Headhunter: Are you ready for robo-interviews? PBS News Hour. 31 AUG 2016. Web. 24 JAN
2018.
- Your next job interview could be with a robot. San Francisco Chronicle. 17 OCT 2017. Web. 24 JAN
2018.
- These 5 Facts Explain How Technology Is Shaping Our World. TIME Magazine. 20 JAN 2016. Web. 24
JAN 2018.