GDPR and automated winnowing of employment applications

nomdeboardie

(Note to mods – feel free to move to a more suitable forum (e.g. legal?) if appropriate – hard to know where to post this!)

According to http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43907689

The UK's Consumers' Association - known more commonly as Which? - has published its own guide to GDPR.
It highlights some of the ways you can take advantage of GDPR's new rights.
These include the right to object to any decisions taken by organisations based solely on algorithms having analysed your personal data. For instance, you can appeal against a decision to refuse you a job interview based solely on computer analysis of your CV.

The relevant section of the Which article, I suppose, being:

Appeal automated decisions made using your data

Companies often use algorithms to make decisions automatically about some issues, such as an online decision to award a loan or in a recruitment aptitude test.

This analysis reveals links between your different behaviours and characteristics to create a personalised profile of your preferences.

This information can then be used by those companies to make decisions that affect you. That might be to award you a loan (or to reject your application) or in screening an application for a job.

Once GDPR is adopted, you can object to solely automated decision making, and some of these decisions (such as online credit or e-recruiting) will be subject to additional controls.

Really :P? If true, I wonder how that would work! How would an applicant know for certain what methods were used to screen them out? And even if they could prove their CV was rejected based on AI analysis, either simple keyword presence/absence, as has presumably been practised by many companies for a long time, or more ‘sophisticated’ recent algorithms, I’m sure companies could just add some token nanosecond-running-of-human-eyes-over massed documents to say they there was a human decision element :rolleyes:. Likewise with use of aptitude test data.

Any thoughts?

screamer

Ah it's not going to make any real difference. If a company doesn't want to hire you they'll find reasons why which are in line with GDPR. As for loans etc the whole reason they use algorithms is to reduce labour and thought process. They'll add in some human rubber stamping in order to comply with the GDPR regs, but if the computer says no, it'll be no and that's it.