Self-driving cars exist. They drive on the roadways alongside those with drivers whose hands remain locked at ten and two and their feet controlling the pedals. I certainly wouldn’t buy a self-driving car until it’s progressed enough that society agrees it will work well for me in the long run and that using the tech won’t inadvertently put others at risk.
Many HR and TA teams are approaching AI tech adoption in their firms in a similar manner. There are some who are further along in their deployment journey than others. (Waymo logged nearly two million miles before its tech was allowed on the highways.) Many HR and business leaders are waiting on governance frameworks, best practices, and ethical bumpers before they let AI operate at full speed inside their orgs.
For many clients of the global talent advisory firm AMS, many HR and TA teams have hit pause on broad AI adoption efforts, as the business community pioneers a new way of working with AI tools and infrastructure. As many of the ethical and compliance considerations remain unsettled, teams are waiting for industry standards to use as a guidepost, according to AMS CEO Gordon Stuart.
So the firm took a stab at drafting its own ethical standards, Stuart told HR Brew.
‘If you start the clock when ChatGPT first appeared in the news… it was about all the things you could do and the point solutions that people were using,” he said “But we could see that this was going to spread…It’s going to have a much broader and deeper impact in how candidates, hiring managers, [and] organizations, [deal] with the whole process of talent acquisition.”
AI tools are great for doing basic task automation, and there have been lots of new tools and processes that leverage AI to impact the tasking involved with recruiting—scheduling interviews, sourcing, answering candidate questions outside business hours. “But for anything that actually takes it further towards actually implementing the process and influencing the outcomes,” TA pros are leery of replacing too much human-to-human contact with human-to-AI contact, Stuart said.
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AMS brought in ethicists; industry partners; and industrial psychology, inclusivity, and legal experts to solicit input for guiding principles.
“We’re not saying these are hard-and-fast rules, but in the absence of any rules or any guidance, it felt like it was a good thing to set out some principles that we should think about,” Stuart said.
The charter is as much a “thought piece” on what’s happening in the TA space right now, and what AMS and its partners are considering, as the technology becomes more pronounced in the global workplace.
“Aside from being efficient [and] cost effective, [AI in TA] needed to have that balance that ensured that you were getting kind of equitable outcomes and that you could explain the outcomes that came from the AI,” Stuart said.
The new charter is organized around eight pillars focused on:
- transparency and explainability;
- fairness, non-discrimination and accessible;
- validation and rectification;
- data minimization and purpose limitation;
- data privacy and security;
- candidate experience;
- human oversight and intervention; and
- ongoing AI literacy and AI upskilling.
“When you’re looking to access talent pools, you want to make sure that you've got the broadest lens or aperture, that you've got to be able to find talent,” Stuart said. “We’re firm believers that diversity is a good thing. And I mean that with a small d, not necessarily a big D. If you get different people with different experiences into organizations, it just makes the whole organization better.”
The Ethical AI Charter shares core principles with the Future of Privacy Forum’s ethical AI framework cosigned by HR tech giants like ADP, Indeed, LinkedIn, and Workday released more than a year ago.
“The volume of applications that organizations get now is massive, and you’re almost turning a talent acquisition function into a talent rejection function because they’ve got so many applications coming in,” Stuart said. “Trying to find your way through that is a real challenge for organizations.”