Author: Mehnaz Rafi, PhD Candidate, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary

A public interest group filed a U.S. federal complaint against artificial intelligence hiring tool, HireVue, in 2019 for deceptive hiring practices. The software, which has been adopted by hundreds of companies, favoured certain facial expressions, speaking styles and tones of voice, disproportionately disadvantaging minority candidates. The Electronic Privacy Information Center argued HireVue’s results were “biased, unprovable and not replicable.” Though the company has since stopped using facial recognition, concerns remain about biases in other biometric data, such as speech patterns. Similarly, Amazon stopped using its AI recruitment tool, as reported in 2018, after discovering it was biased against women. The…