New Study Proves That The Job Market Is Rigged?

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[00:00:10] That's what the latest Stanford study is showing us on algorithmic hiring. It's showing us that everything is rigged, that it's not just bias, that it's not just bad software, that it's not just some weird HR tech experiment that's gone sideways. What that study is showing us is that this machine and these platforms are rejecting workers at scale, and they're hiding the damage behind fake neutral math

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[00:01:09] Now, you might think that all of this is just some weird Black Mirror episode, but this is actually about corporate America turning hiring infrastructure and optimizing it to make workers as desperate as possible. The billionaire class and the millionaire class are centralizing who gets a shot and who doesn't, and they're all doing it under the guise of efficiency. And the ultimate goal for them is to continue accumulating power and making workers more and more desperate and willing to take lower wages, worse benefits, and everybody in control gets to call that the market

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[00:02:14] These weren't tiny companies that were being examined. The employers in the study had combined annual revenue about $225 billion. So this entire study wasn't about the future of hiring. It's looking at what already exists as part of the machinery. And what they looked at was a really simple process. Workers apply, they get sent through a platform, they get to play all sorts of assessment games and psychometrics, the algorithm gives them a score, and then the algorithm spits out recommend or do not recommend And when you look at this from a high volume hiring perspective, do not recommend usually means a human never looks at your resume

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[00:03:21] But there's something really insidious going on. If you're a job seeker, you're applying to a lot of different companies, you're applying to a lot of different jobs, and you're thinking that you have a lot of different chances at getting hired.

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[00:03:57] The TLDR of what that [00:04:00] says is that an algorithm behind all of the applicant tracking platform systems is putting the thumb on the scale so that companies end up creating the same sort of profile that gets hired. There's nothing polite about this. This is engineering a workplace where everybody looks the same. A bunch of companies are using the same kind of digital gatekeeper, and that gatekeeper can decide who wins and more importantly, that gatekeeper also decides who loses.

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[00:05:04] Now, what the study found was that over ninety percent of US employers rely on these algorithms to screen or rank job applicants and those algorithms shape which workers get interviews And how often have we seen in our LinkedIn feeds or in our social platforms people who have been applying to thousands of jobs never to be given an interview? That's because these applications are largely never seen by a human. Now, the authors of the study call those algorithms a bottleneck to opportunity for billions of workers

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[00:06:09] But when you give them a privately owned algorithmic bottleneck that screens workers before they can even speak to a manager, that is how they can continue to maximize shareholder value and make sure that they're getting workers on the cheap. Funny how that works, isn't it? It's all about how much can we extract out of every worker that's out there, and how can we make the job landscape a sea of desperation that we can exploit to the benefits of our C-suite, our shareholders, and our billionaire owners

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[00:07:17] Now that exercise of power is what the game is about. And by exercising power in a very specific way, these organizations and their leadership get to hide what's really going on. Now, would you be surprised to learn that through that exercise of power The researchers found clear racial disparities once they stopped looking at the numbers the way that the corporations wanted them to look at those numbers

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[00:08:13] So when the researchers looked at the data on a job-by-job basis, the entire picture changed. They found that almost 11% of positions showed adverse impact against Black applicants. And they also found that close to five and a half percent of positions showed adverse impact against Asian applicants additionally, they found that almost 31% of Black applicants applied to at least one position that adversely impacted all Black applicants. And almost 19% of Asian applicants applied to at least one position that adversely impacted all Asian applicants

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[00:09:45] that's the whole part about this that is really interesting. They're not using resumes in the old school way. What researchers looked at was how these platforms used game-based assessments, and the companies claimed [00:10:00] that those assessments proactively helped to de-bias the models. And yet when the researchers looked into it, they still found adverse impact against Black and Asian applicants. So when someone says the algorithm doesn't see race, the answer is the people who programmed it definitely saw race, and America in general has always seen race. The labor market has seen race, schools see race, and everything across society is built on racial separation

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[00:11:00] now, if that wasn't bad enough, the study's not just saying that some groups get hurt. It's saying that the same workers can get rejected over and over again because the hiring market is becoming less independent. Historically, if one employer rejected you, another employer might see something different.

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[00:11:45] and what the paper found was that applicants who applied to 10 positions, 4% of those applicants were rejected from all of those 10 roles, and that rate was higher than what you'd expect if each employer were making truly independent [00:12:00] decisions and that carries over the entire job search experience.

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[00:12:59] And then corporate [00:13:00] America has the nerve to tell everybody that you're not trying hard enough. They tell people, "Network more, upskill, be resilient, customize every application, treat your job search like a full-time job." Raise your hand if you've heard all of those things before. Meanwhile, every person in a job search is feeding hours, hope, personal data, and unpaid labor into a machine that's already decided that you're not the type of person that the market wants. That's a gap that no one can close. That's a power gap that every job seeker is helpless against

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[00:14:03] You'll stay quiet about unsafe conditions. You won't ask about additional benefits or healthcare or HSA accounts or a 401or a pension because all you care about is keeping a roof over your head and food on your table and the rent's due Friday And when you are operating in survival mode, you're willing to swallow the whole we're like family BS that they feed you because the alternative is to be out on the street

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[00:15:06] Now, the researchers of the Stanford study actually ran simulations to see what would happen if applicants applied more broadly. And what they found was that no applicant was rejected by every model, and every applicant was recommended somewhere. So the problem wasn't that these workers were universally unemployable. The problem was that real people don't apply to every single thing. They have limited time, money, energy, resources, and things that need to get taken care of.

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[00:16:19] Nobody's paying you to fill out twenty-five applications. Nobody's paying you to make a new account on the nineteenth broken hiring portal that you're working on. Nobody's paying you to upload your resume and then manually type in the same stuff into forty-seven little boxes. That's how the entire process is designed. Some HR tech goblin built a system that hates both humans and PDFs and forces you to spend all of your time and all of your life applying over and over again into a black hole. And the only people that benefit from this is the employer, because when every worker is forced to overapply, the company gets a [00:17:00] bigger pile of desperate people.

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[00:17:41] what you're looking at is manufactured desperation, and every single company is banking on that to make their balance sheets look great because the more workers you can hire on the cheap, the more you can give out in bonuses to the C-suite

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[00:18:32] They'd give workers a chance to appeal a rejection. They would let independent researchers inspect the system. They would stop pretending that their algorithmically designed do not recommend stamp is the same thing as a hiring manager looking over your resume But they don't do that because they want their systems to appear as complex as possible because it [00:19:00] allows them to hide behind the bias that's baked into their systems. Their systems and their algorithms is a shield that's designed to hide the fact that their entire operation has been built and designed by people that don't want people that look like me, that don't want people that are in the global majority in their workplaces.

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[00:20:00] All this is, is technological Jim Crow. And what it's doing, it's protecting the owner class from the one thing that they fear the most, which is workers knowing exactly how the game is rigged. So what does that mean for regular people?

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[00:20:48] And when the bargaining ca- power of employees collapses, wages get suppressed, benefits get trimmed, schedules get worse, unions get harder to build, and everything falls [00:21:00] over to a system that's closer to what we saw in 1789 or the Gilded Age, where a small handful of people benefit and everybody else is living out of the gutter

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[00:21:31] And while it shows that, what you also see is that the people in power keep adopting these structures to weaken workers year after year, industry after industry, and they expect none of us to notice the pattern.

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[00:22:11] And at this point, corporate America has built an international job casino and you are sitting there pulling the lever over and over again, feeding the machine and letting it get trained on how to do a better job of g- of excluding you from the marketplace. The house rules are the algorithms And there's a reason why the house keeps winning because they've rigged the entire thing against you, and the only thing that keeps happening is that corporate America continues to win while workers continue to get screwed. And when you throw the algorithm in it and feed it more data, all it does is that it it teaches itself how to rig the game even faster against you.

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[00:23:24] Thanks for checking out this episode of Left in Exile. Hope you liked it. Drop me a subscribe and drop me a comment on what stood out most for you. And until then, see you next time

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