I felt promoted to write this by a Reddit discussion I recently lurked, decrying the double standards in recruiting that allow recruiters to use AI screening tools whilst claiming to reject AI applications. Whilst there are many things to unpack in the post, I’ll be focusing on the response that justified the position of the recruiters, blaming low-quality applications from patently unqualified candidates.
The specific charges are typically levelled at applicants from the Global South (and Russia). There has even been a glut of articles about AI-assisted virtual interviews recently, implying that applicants from these countries are fraudulently posing as applicants of assorted European nationalities, using deepfake software to change their appearance and AI tools to cheat assessments.
The truth is that the reason people from these countries are taking these steps is a consequence of colonial pillaging, cultural hegemony, and the continued exploration of the power dynamics established during the era of marauding white supremacists.
As a result of Western cultural hegemony, the American dream, British elite, and French bourgeois ideologies have been marketed to dreamers and strivers over generations and cultures. Across the planet, people are desperately trying to level up their lives and the lives of their children and their children’s children, and these hegemonic cultures are seen as the pinnacle of wealth and comfort. This means moonshots — hope, audacity, and taking every chance they can. It also means thousands of ineligible applications for every job posted online, both remote and in-person, making recruiters’ jobs next to impossible without some kind of filtering tool. Except… once there’s a filtering tool in place then it’s short order to tweak and refine it not merely to exclude the candidates physically located on the wrong continent or in possession of the wrong passport, but also those with the wrong DNA/name/other identifying marks.
So that’s where we now find ourselves. Bolster this with ideological attacks on DEI and inclusive hiring policies, a spiralling global economy with increasing wealth inequalities in most Western countries, growing populations in the Global South and ageing populations in the Global North, the rabid drive by free market capitalism to AI-everything, and we have a hiring winter that is freezing out anyone and everyone whose face doesn’t fit. The knock-on effects of the current state-of-play are still to be revealed, but there are likely to be deep and possibly catastrophic losses of entire skill sets that we once believed to be essential, and a lost generation of young workers whose previously-essential education prepared them for a different economy.
Whatever people want to believe, we don’t live in a post-colonial world; we live in a world that has been shaped and defined by colonization. The ripple effects of colonialism are still resounding in every resource conflict, genocide, trade inequity, brain drain, capital flight, and commodity market. They echo in every ATS, LLM, CV, and whatever other acronyms you’re encountering along your hiring journey.
It’s gonna take a whole lot more than some statues tumbling before the legacy of colonialism becomes a footnote in the history books. Let’s just hope we will still have people who can write those notes once it finally happens.
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