back to article BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns HR's in a bit of a pickle, and the Boss wants us to fix it. "I can't see why it's our job to fix this," I say to the Boss. "You wrote the bloody software!" the Boss snaps. "No, we wrote the CODE," the PFY explains. "THEY wrote the software." "What are you talking about?" the Boss asks …

  1. John Riddoch

    I think the boss might need to get a Painkiller and Ram it Down his throat to deal with the headache he's gonna get when the HR team start Screaming for Vengeance about the mess they've gotten in with the AI tools. Just have to hope they don't bring to much Firepower with them.

    1. cmdrklarg
      Thumb Up

      Ah, a fellow member of the Defenders Of The Faith... Thank you for Delivering The Goods! \m/ \m/

      1. Dizzy Dwarf

        Breaking The (Employment) Law

  2. GlenP Silver badge

    The Poor Candidate switch will supply the preferred candidate, along with the two worst applicants

    That's just standard OP for recruitment agencies isn't it?

    1. ARGO

      Except for actually providing a suitable candidate, yes.

      1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

        Except for actually providing a suitable candidate, yes.

        Whoever told you the preferred candidate also has to be suitable?

  3. b0llchit Silver badge
    Happy

    Modern times

    They are also ready to employ an AI computer to be useless at its job and pay handsomely for it while paying a fortune to get rid of it.

    Must be Friday or reality just struck.

  4. Alan J. Wylie

    What position do you get appointed to if your CV mentions "CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN"?

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Devil

      Well, did you notice that Bob Howard's middle names are 'Francis Oliver'?

      1. Alan J. Wylie

        And in one story, Bob's intern is called Peter-Fred Young

      2. EarthDog

        If those demons knew that they’d leave our universe alone

    2. KittenHuffer Silver badge
      1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

        You're immediately given a job at the third line of the hell desk.

        1. tezboyes

          For some that would be an improvement!

    3. Dr Dan Holdsworth
      Pirate

      CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN? I suppose that depends entirely on whether Human Resources handle the application, or hand it to Residual Human Resources.

      1. herman Silver badge

        Residual HR - The makers of Soylent Green I suppose

    4. steelpillow Silver badge

      Violin-maker?

    5. bemusedHorseman
      Alien

      What's an antimemetics division?

      Just be careful not to call it COLORLESS GREEN instead, that's how you end up on the SCP-3125 project...

  5. Howard Sway Silver badge

    HR's AI hiring tool

    I've developed my own AI hiring tool, which consists of small squares of paper, divided into 4 sections by drawing diagonals across them. You write the names of the first 4 candidates to apply in the sections, then put a cocktail stick through the middle and spin it on the desk, hiring the candidate whose name is in the section touching the desk when it falls over.

    People have remarked that this tool makes no proper evaluation of the skills and experience of the candidates, isn't actually intelligent and the chosen name is in fact is completely random, but I point out that this is exactly the same feature set of all the much more expensive software versions of it currently on the market.

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: HR's AI hiring tool

      I always prefer paper CVs actually. Makes selection much easier.

      1. Bebu sa Ware
        Coat

        Re: HR's AI hiring tool

        "I always prefer paper CVs"

        Preferably manuscript applications only.†

        † removes the illiterate and illegible.

        1. TRT Silver badge

          Re: HR's AI hiring tool

          Copperplate handwriting, done with a quill dipped into homemade iron gall ink.

          1. Dante Alighieri

            Re: HR's AI hiring tool

            on vellum

    2. Peter Galbavy

      Re: HR's AI hiring tool

      And if you happen to use a Post-It(tm) note, you put your favoured candidate on the segment with the sticky strip and voila!

    3. Sam not the Viking Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: HR's AI hiring tool

      Always employ lucky people.

      The technique is to take all the CV's, and throw them up in the air. After the dust has settled, you choose one at random: The Lucky One.

      We've had far worse initial-hires at vast expense from bloody 'Recruitment Agencies'. A solution ---->

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: HR's AI hiring tool

        "The technique is to take all the CV's, and throw them up in the air. After the dust has settled, you choose one at random: The Lucky One."

        The puppeteers tried something like that and it didn't work out so well for them. All hail Teela Brown.

        1. Ken G Silver badge

          Re: HR's AI hiring tool

          Yes, just because they're lucky to get the job doesn't mean you're lucky to hire them.

      2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: HR's AI hiring tool

        "The technique is to take all the CV's, and throw them up in the air. After the dust has settled, you choose one at random: The Lucky One."

        Caution: Trigger alert below, possibly not politically correct by today’s standards and may involve out of date stereotypes!

        That reminds me of a *dave allen?) joke from years ago. A vicar, a priest and a rabbi out for a round of gold and get to discussing their remunirations from the congregation collection plate. The priest says he draws a circle on the ground and throws the money up in the air. What lands in the circle, he gets, God gets the rest. The vicar says he does the same, but what lands in the circle goes to God and the vicar gets the rest. The rabbi says he doesn't draw a circle. He just throws the money up in the air and what God wants, he keeps :-)

    4. herman Silver badge

      Re: HR's AI hiring tool

      Just toss the papers down the stairwell and take the one that lands at the top.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HR's AI hiring tool

      Frankly that's still probably more likely to deliver a good result than my minimal interviewing skills do...

  6. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

    Sheer genius. I might start using that term, to replace the phrase "Bachelor in Underwater Basket Weaving" I previously used.

    Hilarious episode once more, and a great start to the weekend

    1. Alister

      Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

      And it can be initialised as BAPS, what's not to like?

      1. thetjb

        Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

        Basic And Coloured Object Narrowing Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

        1. Giles C Silver badge

          Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

          Tasty

      2. The Organ Grinder's Monkey

        Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

        Ref "BAPS"

        The British Association of Plastic Surgeons might have a tiny problem with it?

        1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

          They might start with a tiny problem, but they'll surely make it bigger than it should naturally be

        2. tiggity Silver badge

          Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

          The Organ Grinder's Monkey

          They are actually

          The British Association of AESTHETIC Plastic Surgeons

          SO it makes the more subtle* acronym BAAPS

          * No, still not at all subtle

    2. Great White North

      Re: Bachelor of Advanced Pencil Sharpening

      Where do these rank in relation to Honorary GEDs?

  7. ukgnome
    Terminator

    If only AI had changed Customizations to customisation

    1. MJB7

      Re: Customizations

      No, no, no. en.gb-oxendict ftw!

      (It's a horrible word, but when I need it, it's spelt "colourize".)

      1. Dave314159ggggdffsdds Silver badge

        Re: Customizations

        "What colourise do I have?"

    2. deadlockvictim

      El Reg is a wannabe Yank

      Regardless of the fact that the BOFH is set in England, El Reg is content to surrender their language to Uncle Sam.

      It doesn't seem to be unique to El Reg either.

      Redgate, the maker of databases tools based in Cambridge, has also succumbed to US English as the norm.

      It is all so very sad.

  8. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "OK. So ... I'll be in my office if you need me," the Boss says, wandering off quickly.

    I think he's starting to realise the explanations aren't always kosher. His days must be numbered.

  9. Sam not the Viking Silver badge

    New Employees....

    We needed a new Project Engineer, skilled in handling high-value, long-term, technical projects from initial order, customer specifications, sub-contracting sub-orders, installation, commissioning and hand-over, including getting the invoices in on schedule. We were well prepared to pay a good price for this engineer.

    The agency sent us a bouncer. They said he might need 'a bit of training' but he was cheap.....

    Now I'm prepared to give those who find themselves in unfortunate positions the benefit of the doubt. This was not one of those.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: New Employees....

      Don't give pimps agencies the benefit of the doubt. Advertise for CVs to be submitted direct from the applicants. As an extra safeguard specify what you want in terms of a CV with specific subheadings. The pimps are unlikely to be prepared to redo a stack of CVs from their prepared format (into which they will already have disorganised the candidates own carefully prepared CVs and may stand a good chance of defeating generative AI. Applicants who are really interested in the job will self-select by being prepared to rewrite to the specification and also demonstrate that they can follow a spec. It will be rough on those who don't get the job to have put in the extra work for nothing but at least they'll know they were considered and not buried in the blizzard of agency submissions.

      1. Paul Smith

        Re: New Employees....

        "It will be rough on those who don't get the job" - Reward them with a "thank you for trying" and possibly even giving actual feedback and you will encourage them to try again. Soon every one benefits (except the pimps of course).

      2. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: New Employees....

        "Advertise for CVs to be submitted direct from the applicants."

        I wonder why larger HR divisions have done away with wanting cover letters along with a resume and application. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that HR staff have reading difficulties, but there would be more to file and that's job security. If I had to go back out and get a "real job" again, any company with a full time HR department would be out.

  10. Sgt_Oddball
    Windows

    In my day...

    We just added a Doc/docx and pdf (if we could get away with charging extra) parse and a fuzzy match to a HR CRM system.

    There's just so much wheel reinvention going on where the keyword of AI get added as if it somehow makes it better than everything else that's gone before because it allows the users to be even more brain-dead than before.

    And don't even get me started on Microservices Devs...

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: In my day...

      In my mind, this is one situation where AI could possibly actually make a minor improvement. Well, it's still crap, but it might somehow manage to be less crap than what you had before. Fuzzy matching is a pain. The rules you write to try to match things are fiddly, they can be thrown off by tiny changes in grammar, phrasing, terminology, or sometimes even spaces and punctuation. It often means you're identifying the resume that best fits your idealized pattern, which if people knew your pattern, for example if you were obvious about it from the job description, means the person or agency best able to mash their resume into that format. Since most places don't make that public, it's a pure guess. People know that's going to happen to them, so they do the equivalent of trying to use an early 2000s SEO strategy on their resume. It might work for your system, but any human trying to read it gets something less useful than a shorter one that doesn't try to pack everything they ever did with buzzwords. An AI at least has some chance of handling synonyms or different word order a little better, although I expect it will still have most of the downsides. I've yet to find something that can even slightly approximate reading or skimming by a knowledgeable person.

      I don't know how well it worked for you, but most experiences I've had lead me to believe that your version may have been a lazy and ineffective mechanism that saved a few weeks of manager time at the cost of hiring worse candidates and passing over perfectly qualified ones.

  11. MachDiamond Silver badge

    This tale and Apple backdoor demands

    That might be misinterpreted given the Apple CEO's preferences, but I'll just keep anyway.

    On one hand failed attorneys want software engineers to install a backdoor into secure communication services. On the other, a company is asking for a completely unbiased job candidate selector that can be weighted by anybody in management's whim.

    Then we have phone companies that advertise "unlimited" plans with footnotes telling about the limits.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pointless rant.

    We interviewed a candidate who had everything we had asked for in their CV and more. One of the 'more' bits was 6 months in a role I'd spent 10 years in for the same employer so I asked some questions. They didn't show any signs of understanding the questions, let along the answers. This caused us to ask a few more questions on other roles. They were happy to name all the clients they'd worked for but not able to say precisely what they did or how, the reverse of what I'm used to. I passed. HR got an email complaining that I'd asked the wrong sort of questions and asking for someone else to interview them.

    The next week, the hiring manager who'd interviewed them with me was interviewing candidates for a completely different role. The same candidate appeared as their CV now contained everything we'd asked for in that role. They didn't get that one either.

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