[LI] Selling employee referrals; AI, language & ways of knowing

A repost and a post to LinkedIn. Both relate to ethical issues in employment in the tech industry, with the first focusing on the recent practice of employees selling their referrals to potential outside applicants. The second is an article about issues related to Google AI's abrupt firing of an employee, due to aspects of …

[LI] Gender & self-promotion; redefine “work” to understand recession’s impact on women?

One post and one reply on LinkedIn, addressing aspects of  how economic and employment structures impact women differently than men. In the first, the use of self-assessments in hiring and evaluations highlights a gender difference in self-promotion that tends to work to the disadvantage of women (and the advantage of men). In the second, how …

[LI] Decoupling income from “traditional work”​? Maybe it’s bigger than that

Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2016) and Architects of Intelligence (2019), gave a TED talk in April 2017 entitled "How we'll earn money in a future without jobs." Just before he gets to his main topic of universal basic income (UBI),¹ there is a phrase that caught my …

[LI] Abandoned job applications; time lost on completed applications

Two items posted to LinkedIn, which capture two sides of the time and process demands of employment applications that ought to be automated: applications that applicants abandon; and the aggregated time lost in hundreds of manually completed applications. "4 Reasons Why Job Seekers Aren’t Finishing Your Application Process (And What You Can Do About It)," …

[LI] AI, HR, recruitment & the individual

Several items posted on LinkedIn in late summer and early fall 2017 regarding how automation is being used and perceived as developing in hiring and the workplace. Includes one from 5 years ago when the dialogue was more from the perspective of "big data." Also re-upped current observations about LinkedIn's attempts to automatically serve suggested …

[LI] Jobs as problem; work as broken; jobs not as work

Three different items posted to LinkedIn about work, jobs, and the two confounded. This space seems in tumult, in part because of rise of intelligent automation. However it would certainly help to think more clearly about work and jobs being separate concepts, even as they are related (the latter a subset of the former).  "Jobs …

[LI] Nature of the job market & future of jobs

Three different items posted on LinkedIn, which relate to the the nature of the job search, power imbalance between workers & employers, & the impacts of intelligent automation on the future number & kinds of jobs. "What are the biggest career mistakes to avoid?" Dandan Zhu, Quora, 16 Aug 2017 (posted August 2017) What does …

[LI] Other people’s job algorithms – is this a path we want to follow?

A few days ago, LinkedIn (LI) sent me an email saying that "because you recently viewed" a particular position listed in their jobs section, "you might also like" a list of 25 others. I didn't. But I do see this automatically generated mailing - however well intended - as part of a larger trend that …

[LI] An employment “filter bubble”?

Apparently "70% of people in 2016 were hired at a company where they had a connection," per publicity tweeted by LinkedIn. This puts a number on the old saying, "it's not what you know but who you know." But beyond exhortations to network harder, what else might such a statistic tell us about the job …

[LI] Could bots do salary negotiations better than we do?

Recent research published by Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) - "Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues" - shows that it is possible to train bots to do negotiations. Could this technology be used by job seekers and employers to arrive at optimal salaries? What is interesting is that FAIR's bots were negotiating …