6: Future of Recruitment

In recent years, there has been a great deal of attention to the potential misuses of new recruitment technologies, in particular AI (Wilson et al., 2021). Although these concerns are wide-ranging, they usually center around the inadvertent introduction or proliferation of biases, the mismanagement and loss of confidential or sensitive personal data, and the uncomfortable realization that we live in a surveillance economy where our privacy has been lost, or at least diluted (Shank, Graves, Gott, Gamez, & Rodriguez, 2019). In a way, it doesn't matter so much whether these problems emerge as a consequence of technical gaps in those tasked with deploying AI in recruitment, whether the issue is insufficient attention to moral considerations, or merely that they are overly focused on optimizing for business outcomes at the expense of harming certain candidates or job seekers. The critical point is that AI, like any new tool or technology, has the potential to introduce unfairness and suffering in job seekers and applicants, often in ways not understood by employers (Hohenstein & Jung, 2020).