Discovering that AI recruiting is important to men and women, Amazon is forced to turn it off

After many refinements that failed, Amazon gave up its recruitment project.

According to Reuters, in 2014, Amazon set up a technical team in Edinburgh, Scotland, to find ways to automate recruitment. The group created 500 computer models to review CVs of candidates they had previously recruited to filter out about 50,000 key terms. After that, the system will search the web to select and recommend suitable candidates for the job.

Picture 1 of Discovering that AI recruiting is important to men and women, Amazon is forced to turn it off
The AI ​​concluded that men are more suitable for work at Amazon.

"Literally, when racing for this system 100 candidates, it will choose for you the best 5 candidates and we will recruit those people," an internal source told Reuters.

However, a year later, Amazon engineers discovered their AI recruitment system had a rather serious problem: It didn't like women. The cause of this problem is that the AI ​​analyzed the resumes sent to Amazon in the past 10 years to accumulate data about candidates.

Based on the collected data, the AI concluded that men are more suitable for work at Amazon. The engineering team discovered that the AI ​​has automatically reduced the scores of CVs from women and the type of candidates who attended two universities for girls only.

Amazon engineers repaired the system to overcome the above biased forms. However, they fear that the AI ​​will find new ways to unfairly treat candidates.

Picture 2 of Discovering that AI recruiting is important to men and women, Amazon is forced to turn it off
Jeff Bezoz - Amazon's boss.

Important male disrespect is not the only problem with this recruitment AI. The internal source told Reuters that the AI ​​also proposed candidates who were not qualified for the position.

After strenuous tweaks, Amazon finally abandoned its recruitment project last year because the directors lost faith in it. Amazon's recruitment experts also review the list of recommendations that AI provides but never rely entirely on it.

"Amazon employers never use this way to recruit candidates for their jobs," the Amazon spokesman said.