Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Business

Joseph Santana says some AI biases must be swapped to maximize the benefit secured from the 21st century workforce

In the age of AI recruiting, old biases must be swapped out to drive beneficial workplace diversity, according to Joseph Santana, a futurist, former businessperson, and DEI expert.

Joseph Santana
Photo courtesy Joseph Santana
Photo courtesy Joseph Santana

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI) recruiting, old biases must be swapped out to drive beneficial workplace diversity, according to Joseph Santana, a futurist, former businessperson, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) expert. In particular, the cultural fit bias that has found its way into modern-day AI recruiting tools must be replaced. This article delves into the cultural fit philosophy and how it became an AI bias. It also explains how replacing it with a new bias, cultural add, can turn AI into a diversity hiring driver.

The Cultural Fit Bias Common to AI is the Biggest Enemy of Diversity Hiring

Culture fit is the concept of screening potential candidates to determine if their values, beliefs, and behaviors align with the company’s values. This philosophy became popular in the 1980s, with academic papers proposing that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values meshed with the organization’s, they would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder, and make the company more productive. However, studies have shown that diverse teams are more productive than homogeneous ones.

Despite this, the culture fit bias persists and has found its way into modern-day AI recruiting tools. Through programming and training data, AI systems, even those used by companies claiming to seek diversity in hiring, are still biased toward cultural fit. This predisposes these systems to look for candidates most like current employees who are considered the most successful, which is counter to diversity hiring goals and indirectly hires for culture fit with the company’s traditional homogeneous employee cohort.

Replacing Culture Fit with a Cultural Add Bias Turns AI into a Diversity Hiring Driver

Hiring for culture add means hiring team members with the skill to do the job that brings something new to the team instead of perfectly matching the current group. Giving AI a cultural add bias involves instructing the system to seek candidates with the requisite skills whose background or life experience adds some missing cultural element to the team. This may require adding extra information about the team composition the new hire will be brought into, but this would be a minimal input task. By the way, this approach does not give preference to any specific group of people but instead seeks to increase the team’s diversity to expand perspectives.

Conclusion

Joseph Santana proposes swapping out the cultural fit bias for a cultural add bias to turn AI into a fair and non-discriminatory automated diversity hiring machine. By the way, Santana points out that this is not the only bias that needs to be replaced. Many others include AI systems programmed to assign different salaries for the same work based on algorithms that determine the minimum amount a particular person will accept for a job. Obviously, this is in direct conflict with efforts to promote pay equity.

With Joseph Santana’s approach, organizations can tune their rapidly spreading HR AI systems to support their efforts to upgrade their organization’s practices to secure the maximum benefits from the increasingly diverse 21st-century workforce.

Avatar photo
Written By

Jon Stojan is a professional writer based in Wisconsin. He guides editorial teams consisting of writers across the US to help them become more skilled and diverse writers. In his free time he enjoys spending time with his wife and children.

You may also like:

Tech & Science

A new free app is helping Canadians verify whether the products they buy are made in Canada.

Life

The opioid epidemic costs the U.S. over $1.5 trillion annually, overloading hospitals, public health systems, and law enforcement.

Business

The feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman has become one of the bitterest rivalries in business history.

Tech & Science

The new National Cyber Security Strategy focuses on a “whole-of-society and agile approach to protecting our nation’s cyber security”