Identifying the right target

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Former Welsh Secretary, David Davies, was busy earlier this week blaming AI for his failure to land a lot of jobs for which he applied. Some unkind souls might think that rejecting Davies for a job was actually a feather in the cap of AI, showing it to be a good judge of his suitability for employment. I suspect that the truth is more mundane: there is a valid point in what he has to say about his repeated rejections, but he’s aiming at the wrong target. Then again, grabbing hold of the wrong end of the stick is hardly out of character.

Part of his complaint is that he was applying for degree-level jobs without being in possession of a degree, and AI was rejecting him automatically as a result. In breaking news, and speaking as someone who has done a great deal of recruiting in my time, I can reveal that before AI was even a twinkle in the eye of its inventors, it was customary for employers, using only human perusal processes, to reject such applications. Even if only on the basis that the applicant, by applying for a job for which (s)he didn’t meet the basic criteria was displaying an inability either to read or else to understand the job ad. Recruiters, increasingly faced with a large number of applicants, will usually take a very simple approach to eliminating many of them without further consideration, and that doesn’t require the use of any fancy computer systems.

The bigger question, which he seems to be grasping for but can’t quite articulate effectively, is whether a degree is really necessary for many of those jobs. On that, he has a point. I would agree with him that there are people whose experience gained in the various roles which they’ve performed probably makes their skill set as good as, or even better than, someone who has a piece of paper but little real experience of anything (although I make no judgement here as to whether Davies falls into that category or not). But many employers take the easy way out. Rather than attempt to assess what alternative routes might make someone suitable for a particular job, they simply demand a degree (or some other qualification) and use that as a filter to reduce the number of applications which they receive and then have to peruse. Perhaps his real complaint is that the employers to which he has applied are just too lazy to consider him properly. It might even be fair comment.

If they were using a really good AI system, then AI might well be able to analyse CVs and compare them against job descriptions in great detail, faster than any human could, and identify candidates who might be suitable regardless of their formal qualifications. That would mean that his real complaint ought to be that the AI systems being used aren’t intelligent enough to spot what he clearly believes to be his exceptional talents. It surely couldn’t be that they are indeed using such systems and there just aren’t enough exceptional talents to spot.