Question:

How does a person's attitude and value impact their decision-making?

Does having colleagues with diverse ways of thinking make a difference in a person's position in decision-making?

Point:

Many C-suite leaders, including the CEO of Wells Fargo, have attributed a lack of diversity in their workforce to a limited pool of underrepresented applicants. As more and more companies increase efforts to diversify their workforce, artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how companies recruit and select employees.

On a basic level, AI offers the opportunity to access a wider pool of applicants. For example, many companies have traditionally used on-campus recruiting. Organizations can send only a limited number of people to job fairs, and some quality candidates may not even attend them. Furthermore, recruiting may be narrowly targeted toward elite university students. However, only 6 percent of first-year students at elite universities are Black.

Although many organizations have implemented implicit bias training with some success, AI does not have the same unconscious biases as human interviewers. Human interviewers may not be able to pinpoint precisely how unconscious bias has impacted their decisions because humans often rely on intuition or a gut feeling. Utilizing AI ensures that HR managers apply the same hiring criteria to every candidate. For example, companies like OutMatch use video interviewing technology to conduct the same interview with the same questions for every candidate. Even if biases stem from the AI programming, it is significantly easier to spot where they occur in the algorithm and address them than for human biases.

Some organizations may worry that using AI in the hiring process will make their company seem detached. Greg Moran, CEO of OutMatch, contends that the opposite is true. Automating repetitive tasks enables hiring managers to focus on the more essential ones, such as developing a personal connection with job candidates. While increasing workforce diversity is just one aspect of an organizations diversity management strategy, AI depicts a promising future of a less biased hiring process.