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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Oh man, I’ve always wondered how the hiring process could become more impersonal and demeaning, now I know!
About a year ago I ran across something (a ZA startup, by the looks of it) that essentially pitched casting reels as an interview screener, and one of the highlights of the pitch was “they just send in a video clip introducing themselves, and you can tell whether they’re a cultural fit”.
No need for all that messy scheduling! No misunderstandings[0]! Totally fair[1]! Totally not abusable[2]!
Noped out of that so hard, on account of all the obvious reasons, but also because it immediately felt like it had ulterior motives/uses, such as dataset for ML training.
Imagine we’ll see some more of that.
[0] - that you get to do anything about
[1] - y’know, if you ignore the complete power imbalance and complete susceptibility to allowing hidden profiling
[2] - except for all the extremely obvious ways
Oof.
That being said, that’s not unheard of. I remember back when I was looking at scholarships and such that some places wanted video submissions, and I have friends in other industries that had to do the same. That in no way diminishes the shittiness of it all.
The ML angle seems novel though. Ostensibly you’d have a resume/cover letter that is effectively a set of tags for the video component, which I guess you could do sentiment analysis over? I guess the end game is to build a robot that can tell if you are a team player or not, and if you’d lie about it out of necessity for a job vs. eagerly for kool aid.
That strikes me as probably illegal, at least in the US (although I can't find a better source, if someone can find where the EEOC says that it'd be appreciated.)
yes thanks for reminding me that the US is the center of the known universe and that all morality and allowances of anything ever should be modelled on events there. I almost forgot!
Using it for ML training would also be illegal in the EU under GDPR.
But this already exists. My colleague had to submit a video self-interview when applying to Goldman Sachs, the pillar of morality and ethics in the corporate world.
I didn't intend to make any comment on morality. US law seems relevant given that it's near-impossible to find one of these nonsense AI startups that isn't either in the US or targeting US customers. Indeed, this one looks to be based in Los Angeles.
I literally stated that the thing I was referencing in my comment (that you replied to) was from ZA. but I appreciate your doubled-down US-centrism in your second reply. nice job! glad you can remind me again! I must've forgotten about it in the handful of hours since you last did it!
@froztbyte @Eiim "ZA" is not a country abbreviation that many united statians know, at least from my anecdotal experience.
"knowing about ZA as the ISO code" is not, in fact, the thing I was addressing there :)
I'm familiar enough with country codes that I do know what ZA means, but in the context I didn't realize that it was referring to a country, I thought it was just an abbreviation I wasn't familiar with. In retrospect that probably should have stood out to me more.