01 October 2021 (11:58-UTC-07 Tango 06) 09 Mehr 1400/23 Safar 1443/25 Wu-Xu 4719

A recently published study blames the so called labor shortage on the dominance of artificial intelligence operated hiring systems now used by 99% of ‘Fortune 500’ corporations; these systems are deleting applications for the most mediocre reasons, partly because of incorrect job data inputs by the Human Resource personnel responsible for programing them!

The main-stream news media has been quick and persistent in blaming the pandemic fear-mongering response (which they had a major part in stoking), but the truth is that this has been coming for awhile. In 2018, during the fifth interview with the same HR manager with the same company over a 16 month period of applying for a job that was never filled, I asked the HR manager what was up with them not filling the position since they’ve been advertising it for more than a year and conducted dozens of testing and interviews for it. She explained that “about five years ago” the company switched to a third party hiring contractor that is using computers to make the hiring decisions. Prior to that she had the authority to do the testing, interviews and make the decision as to who gets hired, but now she just handles the testing and interviews, the hiring was now in the hands of a computer system operated by a contractor, and that computerized system would only hire people who met criteria that put them in a top ten list, which apparently the computerized system was not finding any of the applicants (despite their years of experience or qualifications) worthy of making the top ten!  The computer’s criteria included other things besides years of experience and technical qualifications, things like criminal history, age, sex, ethnicity, education, test results, etc. (Interesting, because under U.S. employment law it is illegal to use a person’s age, sex, ethnicity and other ‘demographics’ to determine employment!)

On 15SEP2021, the Harvard Gazette published an article talking about 27-million ‘hidden workers’ and how A-I systems, coupled with demographic changes, are effectively excluding qualified applicants from employment!

Joseph B. Fuller ’79, M.B.A. ’81, co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work project at Harvard Business School, stated that most studies about unemployment/job seekers (supply side) do not look at the employers (demand side) as the potential cause of people not getting hired.  And government data only looks at numbers, not cause and effect.

Fuller explained that today’s hiring systems first throw out applicants with criminal records, and people with no college education.  Military veterans are thrown out because of an age old problem of translating military skills to silly-vilian (civilian) job skills. Next to be thrown out are people who have large gaps in employment history (my problem apparently).  Fuller also explained that there are a lot of people who fit several of those categories, such as being a veteran, and long term unemployed, and no college education.

Another problem is how job descriptions are being inputted into the computer system: “…as the report points out, is that the creation of job descriptions and their curation over time is very haphazard. Most job descriptions are not updated that often; they’re updated by recruiters with [little] input from the [relevant] supervisors…”-Joseph B. Fuller, Harvard Gazette interview

The study is called Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, and it postulates that qualified U.S. workers are systematically filtered out by the hiring process.

On 04SEP2021, The Wall Street Journal published and article called Companies Need More Workers. Why Do They Reject Millions of Résumés?  The article is not just about automated hiring systems that are rejecting millions of applications, but how existing employees are being blocked from having any say in how their jobs are done or how the company is operated.  It sounds like these A-I systems that corporations are using are looking to employ robots, not humans.

29SEP2021: The small city of Yuma, Arizona, lost the 8th most workers in the U.S., to 2020 pandemic fear mongering!

On 11AUG2021, National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) published its study on the ‘labor shortage’, which included these conclusions;

• Job matching will remain an important friction in the labor market as labor force participation rises. This will slow the reentry of new workers as the economy moves to a new equilibrium for employment and wages in different sectors.
• The new, post-COVID employment equilibrium will not be the same as the one we left behind in early 2020, as some returning workers moving across sectors and some older workers choosing not to return are likely to change the demographics of the labor force beyond this year.

04AUG2021, Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) published results of their survey of unemployed people looking for work; 42% blamed the employers, saying they get zero response from the employers after applying or sending a resume!

MIT tells you how to beat the A-I hiring machines!

July 2021: The 2020 pandemic response killed 22-million U.S. jobs in just two months! Recovery efforts in 2021 have done nothing to help the unemployed!

June 2021: Where have Minnesota’s ‘lost workers’ gone to?

On 04MAY2021, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) published an article pointing out that the true sign of a labor shortage is rapidly increasing wages across the board, and this is not actually happening, especially in the hospitality market; “Further, when restaurant owners can’t find workers to fill openings at wages that aren’t meaningfully higher than they were before the pandemic…….that’s not a labor shortage, that’s the market functioning. The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher….

… Further, despite many anecdotes of restaurants in particular not being able to find workers, the labor market added 280,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector in March, the sixth highest percent increase in the last half century….”

January 2021: U.S. workers lost $3.7-trillion in earnings due to pandemic layoffs!

May 2020: SHRM reveals problems with A-I hiring systems!

December 2019: Artificial Intelligence will determine your next job!

October 2018: Amazon deletes ‘secret’ A-I hiring system due to it being biased!

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