We have seen the pattern before: an evaluation practice generates a corresponding response designed to outwit the practice. The SATs lead to the SAT prep industry. The rise of drug testing leads to the clean urine purveyors. The latest iteration of this phenomenon began with the automated screening of resumes by employers.
In a piece in Inside Higher Education, Lilah Burke describes the response by colleges that have adopted AI-based systems for scanning resumes to assist students in preparing resumes that will make it past the employer AI-based resume screen systems. The systems provide students with feedback on how to tailor their resumes to maximize their chances of getting past the automated systems and making it to a human reviewer. Corresponding systems are available to assist students in preparing LinkedIn profiles, selecting career paths, and delivering elevator pitches.
Of course the resume systems race for jobs carries all the common social inequities from biased algorithms to differences in the capacity of colleges to afford the new systems as well as differences in the ways in which they are applied.
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