In practice, though, critics warn, such software runs a high risk of reinforcing existing biases, making it harder for women, Black people and others from non-traditional backgrounds to get hired. In theory, the technology offers businesses the prospect of radically expanding the diversity of their candidate pool. executives or hiring managers to ever discern, that can predict which candidate will excel at a given role. offers the promise that there exists some hidden constellation of data, too complex or subtle for an H.R. Increasingly, artificial intelligence has been a part of what these firms are selling.Ī.I. Instead, these tech companies argue, with better screening tools (which, not coincidentally, these same companies happen to sell), this problem can fixed. Why waste time on a process that would ultimately produce a result no better than throwing darts? For decades, a segment of the tech industry has grown based on an acceptance of Gladwell’s premise-that humans are terrible at forecasting job performance-but an emphatic rejection of his resort to nihilism. Gladwell explained, when it came time to find a new assistant or hiring an accountant, he did so in explicitly arbitrary ways-picking whoever an acquaintance recommended or someone he met on the street, with only the most cursory of face-to-face conversation. The journalist Malcolm Gladwell, on his podcast, “Revisionist History,” devoted a recent episode to his theory of “hiring nihilism.” It is Gladwell’s belief that people are so bad at predicting who will perform well at a given role-especially based on traditional screening criteria such as CVs and candidate interviews-that one should simply concede that all hiring is essentially arbitrary. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here. This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business.

Hirevue video interview process