In her book Weapons of Math Destruction, author Cathy O'Neil writes: “Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.” This is an important consideration to bear in mind as the industry increasingly looks to automation to add efficiencies to hiring processes.

O'Neil goes on to point out: “This underscores another common feature of WMDs [weapons of math destruction]. They tend to punish the poor. This is, in part, because they are engineered to evaluate large numbers of people. They specialize in bulk, and they’re cheap. That’s part of their appeal. The wealthy, by contrast, often benefit from personal input. A white-shoe law firm or an exclusive prep school will lean far more on recommendations and face-to-face interviews than will a fast-food chain or a cash-strapped urban school district. The privileged, we’ll see time and again, are processed more by people, the masses by machines.”

Recently, Harvard Business Review partnered with Accenture to study the impact of automation our hiring processes. The results were unsettling. According to "Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent", companies that lean heavily into automation “regularly eliminate all but those candidates who most closely match the job requirements specified”. The study was based on a survey of more than 8,000 hidden workers and more than 2,250 executives.

The HBS report, released Sept. 4, provides insight into America’s labor market dynamics, including the widely reported mismatch between the more than 10 million job openings - a record high - and the more than 8.4 million unemployed actively looking for work.

"Those workers are thus hidden from consideration by the design and implementation of the very processes that were meant to maximize a company’s access to qualified and available talent"

“At the same time, an enormous and growing group of people are unemployed or underemployed, eager to get a job or increase their working hours. However, they remain effectively ‘hidden’ from most businesses that would benefit from hiring them by the very processes those companies use to find talent.”

"Hidden workers” fall into three categories: “missing hours” (working one or more part-time jobs but willing and able to work full-time); “missing from work” (unemployed for a long time but seeking employment); or “missing from the workforce” (not working and not seeking employment but willing and able to work in the right situation).

According to HBR, hidden workers come from multiple categories, and include:

• Veterans, who have many of the skills that are in high demand — from underwater welding to emergency nursing care — but who are not hired in civilian jobs because they lack the necessary licenses.
• Caregivers — most of them women, but also men — who are forced to drop out of full-time and part-time work because they are needed at home to provide childcare, eldercare, or both.
• The formerly incarcerated or recovered substance abusers who do not even get past the application stage.
• Those with health issues — physical or mental — are often pre-judged and not considered for positions.
• Older workers who bring experience and skills but are considered an expensive burden.
• Immigrants and refugees who have credentials from their home countries but struggle to get hired because they lack language skills.

The study estimated that there are more than 27 million hidden workers in the United States and “the sheer magnitude of this population reveals the potential impact that their substantial re-absorption into the workforce would have.” So what keeps these workers hidden?

The study listed several barriers that keep candidates hidden:

• A widening training gap “The rapid pace of change in many occupations, driven in large part by advancing technologies, has made it extremely difficult for workers to obtain relevant skills. The evolution in job content has outstripped the capacity of traditional skills providers, such as education systems and other workforce intermediaries, to adapt. The perverse consequence is that developing the capabilities employers seek increasingly requires the candidate to be employed.”
• Inflexibly configured automated recruiting systems “An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a workflow-oriented tool that helps organizations manage and track the pipeline of applicants in each step of the recruiting process. A Recruiting Management or Marketing System (RMS) complements the ATS and supports recruiters in all activities related to marketing open positions, sourcing key talent, creating talent pools, and automating aspects of the recruiting process such as automated candidate scoring and interview scheduling… These systems are vital; however, they are designed to maximize the efficiency of the process. That leads them to hone in on candidates, using very specific parameters, in order to minimize the number of applicants that are actively considered… Most also use a failure to meet certain criteria (such as a gap in full-time employment) as a basis for excluding a candidate from consideration irrespective of their other qualifications. As a result, they exclude from consideration viable candidates whose resumes do not match the criteria but who could perform at a high level with training.”
• Failure to recognize and elevate the business case “Most companies that have engaged with hidden workers have done so through their corporate foundations or corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Those are praiseworthy activities, but also inherently reinforce the myth that hiring hidden workers is an act of charity or corporate citizenship, rather than a source of competitive advantage.”
• Outdated job descriptions Rather than being reassessed and drafted from scratch, job descriptions are often “larded with legacy requirements and ‘nice to have’ attributes rather than a focus on a limited list of ‘must-have’ skills and experiences that correlate to performance in the role.”

The study noted that research found 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS and the employer survey contained in the study confirmed that midsize enterprises with between 50 and 999 employees use such filtering technology quite extensively. For larger enterprises with more than 1,000 workers, the percentage of employers using an RMS rose to 69 percent. In the United States, 75 percent of employers use these technologies.

There is hope. Companies that have shifted their recruitment processes to focus on “hidden workers” are reporting bottom-line benefits, according to HBR. Such firms reported being 36 percent less likely to face talent or skills shortages relative to companies that didn’t target “hidden workers” while indicating that such workers outperform their peers across such criteria as attitude and work ethic, productivity, engagement, attendance, and quality of work.