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Businesses AI Education Software Technology

How To Beat South Korea's AI Hiring Bots and Land a Job (reuters.com) 41

As Korean firms start using AI to help hire new employees, students are going to school to learn how to beat the bots. Reuters reports: From his basement office in downtown Gangnam, careers consultant Park Seong-jung is among those in a growing business of offering lessons in handling recruitment screening by computers, not people. Video interviews using facial recognition technology to analyze character are key, according to Park. "Don't force a smile with your lips," he told students looking for work in a recent session, one of many he said he has conducted for hundreds of people. "Smile with your eyes."

Classes in dealing with AI in hiring, now being used by major South Korean conglomerates like SK Innovation and Hyundai Engineering & Construction, are still a tiny niche in the country's multi-billion dollar cram school industry. But classes are growing fast, operators like Park's People & People consultancy claim, offering a three-hour package for up to 100,000 won ($86.26). According to Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI), nearly a quarter of the top 131 corporations in the country currently use or plan to use AI in hiring. One AI video system reviewed by Reuters asks candidates to introduce themselves, during which it spots and counts facial expressions including 'fear' and 'joy' and analyses word choices. It then asks questions that can be tough: "You are on a business trip with your boss and you spot him using the company (credit) card to buy himself a gift. What will you say?" AI hiring also uses 'gamification' to gauge a candidate's personality and adaptability by putting them through a sequence of tests.

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How To Beat South Korea's AI Hiring Bots and Land a Job

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  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @07:54PM (#59617900)
  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @08:01PM (#59617924)
    Is it just me or does it seem like you have to be good at a whole bunch of things in order to land a job, but your actual ability to do the job in question seems to be a very small factor?
    • Your education doesn't matter either.

    • As it has always been. It's one of the first things everyone learns when they start seeking employment: Get a haircut, wear a suit, take a shower, because superficial appearances matter.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        The further you complicate that, the more it becomes a skill in and of itself.

        When interviewing with people, there's a ton of subtle signals that you'll be judged on, often subconsciously, by your interviewers. For example. the interviewer may tell himself that how you dress for a tech interview (assuming it's not too crazy) doesn't matter, but it always does, because our judgement is not exclusively in our conscious control. (BTW, the right answer for dress for a professional interview is always to dress

    • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      As it should be.

      Very few positions are tailored to antisocial turds who can't string a polite sentence together if their life depends on it.

      You're either in a small company and will be expected to have customer relations on top of colleague relations or you're in a big company probably working in a cubicle where you don't want people in a 10m radius smelling you.

      Most jobs can be taught to a motivated individual anyway...

      • The problem is that they don't just filter out the antisocial, they filter out everyone who isn't a marketing genius. Big difference.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Is it just me or does it seem like you have to be good at a whole bunch of things in order to land a job, but your actual ability to do the job in question seems to be a very small factor?

      In dysfunctional organizations (government, large corporations), this has always been the case. They are just reducing the money they did throw away on HR drones now.

    • Coreans are number one in the world on plastic surgery, so making up for shortcomings by faking it seems to be their culture.
    • that is also partly why we developers can charge 1 arm + 1 leg
  • If the interview doesn't have to be on-premises, get a hold of the software or algorithms behind them, and train counter AI to make avatars of candidates to say the right things and have the right facial expressions to get hired.

    • More human than human is our motto

    • by Falos ( 2905315 )

      bots vs bots

      the early pulp scifi were right, but could never have guessed how

      what a time to be alive

  • interview personality tests are an joke as they get rid of real people who can think.

    Questions like

    "You are on a business trip with your boss and you spot him using the company (credit) card to buy himself a gift.

    May work but others are not that clear cut and a choice of being an snitch can be bad.

    Other bad questions are

    Did you ever break rules??

    and more

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by clive27 ( 889511 )
      Korean culture is based on Chinese Confucianism that puts respecting elders at one of the top priorities. They are looking for a clever and legal answer that gently guide the boss from doing unethical thing while not embarrassing the boss. Correct answers aren't "Report the boss to HR" or "Tell the boss not use the corporate card to buy himself a gift"
  • but in the United States these are used to weed out qualified local applicants so the company can apply for a (cheaper and already trained) visa holder. Their algorthtm mostly boils down to ( if (!has4YearDegree) { sendRejectLetter()} ).
  • "Don't force a smile with your lips," he told students looking for work in a recent session, one of many he said he has conducted for hundreds of people. "Smile with your eyes."

    This is ancient. A genuine smile crinkles the corners of the eyes. It's a body language thing to tell if a smile is honest.

    Some politicians and preachers have learned to do this -- Joe Biden, Pat Robertson, and so much it now looks fake and strained.

  • by uncqual ( 836337 ) on Monday January 13, 2020 @11:52PM (#59618370)

    "You are on a business trip with your boss and you spot him using the company (credit) card to buy himself a gift.

    At least in the US, this is a potentially stupid question because it depends on the background of the person being asked. I've worked at companies that gave me a credit card with their name on the face of it (along with mine in the "customized" name), but it was in my name and I was legally required to pay the bills -- if I wanted reimbursement, I had to file an expense report. I've also worked at companies that issued credit cards where the company paid the bill. In the former, you were technically supposed to use the card only for company business, but that was widely ignored and it certainly wasn't considered unethical to do so. In the latter, it would have been considered unethical to use it for anything but company business.

    It's a little like a question "Do you use the copy machine at work for personal purposes?". Perhaps at most companies this is against policy, but it's widely done for small amount of copying (not, for example, printing out 2000 flyers for your garage band). However, for many years I worked for a company that explicitly said "Feel free to use the copy machines for personal use -- we would rather you spend 5 minutes making personal copies than leaving work, going to Kinkos, making copies, and then returning to work an hour after you left" (we were, of course, almost all salaried and most people worked whatever time was needed to get the job done).

    • Unhappy employees sometimes turn to petty theft as a way to relieve the stress. If there is no job satisfaction, office supplies start to go missing.

      • or at retail jobs where the test weeds out people and only people they get are people who can lie to pass the test and you know that petty theft can be big at them.

  • by TheNarrator ( 200498 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @12:09AM (#59618392)

    Blade Runner predicts the future again:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • ... using the company (credit) card to buy himself a gift. What will you say?

    "How will you explain that expense to your boss?" Either he admits it before it is a problem, or I know what lie to repeat, if questioned.

So... did you ever wonder, do garbagemen take showers before they go to work?

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