Growing reliance on artificial intelligence to screen job applications is raising serious concerns, as critics warn the shift risks stripping away human judgement from the hiring process.
Advocates claim that using AI to filter applicants is “dehumanising” and may introduce bias; they worry that automated systems are replacing common-sense, person-to-person evaluation.
Major employers, including McDonald’s and Woolworths, are already using the technology to process large volumes of applications. While this may improve efficiency for companies dealing with high demand, it also means decisions that once involved human discretion are increasingly being handed over to algorithms.
Unite Union assistant national secretary Gerard Hehir expressed unease about this growing trend, reflecting broader concern among worker advocates that technology is being adopted faster than its impacts are fully understood.
“AIs are basically black boxes, because they’re not just implementing the code; they are learning and developing their own logic and system. It basically becomes a black box,” Hehir said.
“No one actually knows, at the heart of it, an AI system, how it actually makes a decision.”
Though the technology was originally promoted as a solution to eliminate bias, Hehir said it has instead produced the opposite effect.
“The processes themselves often reflect the biases of those that wrote them and designed them,” he said.
“Far from actually removing the bias, they reinforce or even amplify the bias.”
Hehir said AI is most effective when used for straightforward, objective checks, such as confirming a driver’s licence or the correct visa – where clear requirements leave little room for error.
However, he warned that some companies may be pushing the technology beyond its proper role, using it to make subjective judgements about an applicant’s personality that are better left to human discretion.
“If it’s used to assess hard, measurable criteria, no, not a problem. But when it’s making evaluations like what’s your emotional response to a question or whether you sounded a bit stressed or depressed or something like that, that is a major problem; I think it is dehumanising.”