Part two of two with Roz Hirsch.

Roz has been applying for jobs and not getting interviews she would once have gotten easily. She's been rejected in under an hour. She's been rejected at midnight, by companies where nobody was awake to read anything.

Her expertise is language assessment, so she makes the argument nobody else is making. A resume is an assessment. Assessments require a validity argument, meaning evidence that the decisions you make with them are the right decisions. Validity is a property of the decision, not of the instrument. And validation has to happen at every single company that adopts a screening tool, because a tool validated somewhere else for something else has not been validated for you.

So, has anyone gone back and reread the rejections? Roz cites hiring managers who did, after two full cycles that produced no hires, and found people who should not have been rejected. That's a validity failure, and the near-instant rejection timestamps suggest nobody is checking.

We also get into what the screen is actually reading. Roz's point is that it isn't only the resume and cover letter. It's postal code, financial history, whatever else is available, and the inference that nobody from that postal code works here so this person probably won't either. I bring in Uber's pickers and ants, airline pricing, and the casual nursing algorithms that offer lower wages to people whose credit history says they'll accept.

Then the same argument turned on education. Roz on the professor whose take-home midterm produced near-perfect scores and whose in-class final didn't, and why the bell curve was the problem before AI ever showed up. Why she doesn't have a cheating problem. And the classroom exercise she runs with AI image generation, where students ask for one bear and keep getting several.

Links

• Roz's Random Ramblings: Language, History, and Other Adventures
• Roz on LinkedIn
• Women Writin' 'Bout AI
• Carol Chappelle, Iowa State and The Applied Linguistics Encyclopedia
• Image Description Games: Twin Pics, Say What You See, and Promptle
• Enshittification by Cory Doctorow and our show about the same
• Uber pickers and ants
• The Brown Professor story about AI and cheating
• The TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language)
• Part one of Kim & Roz talkin' 'bout AI

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Support the show

Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/