Can AI Spur a Talent Renaissance?

AI is a powerful tool, but it doesn’t set its own purpose. AI amplifies intentions. When you hear “AI will do X or Y”, remember this: AI = Amplified Intentions. Case in point: 

• If we add AI to hiring models to ‘screen out’ candidates for the pedigree they lack, then AI will screen out. 

• If we decide to ‘screen in' candidates based on skills they have - however those skills were acquired - deploying AI with that intention can enable ‘screen in signals’ at scale. 

Opportunity@Work's Chief Impact Officer Papia Debroy and I recently wrote about this in The Brookings Institution “Using AI to advance skills-first hiring":

“In today’s labor market, if we direct AI to observe the patterns of the past, it will replicate the paper ceiling and accelerate its exclusionary effects. Instead, we should direct AI technologies to observe and understand workers’ skills and replicate skills-based pathways to accelerate the tearing of the paper ceiling, exponentially opening up opportunities to STARs* and connecting employers to the skilled talent they need.”

*STARs = the 70+ million people in the U.S. who do not have a bachelor’s degree - but are Skilled Through Alternative Routes like on-the-job, through military service, community college, partial college completion, workforce training programs, skills bootcamps, and more.

Fears of ‘algorithmic exclusion’ are legitimate, but not because of some inherent quality of AI. The risk comes from lazily perpetuating the paper ceiling that pointlessly excludes millions of people with the skills to do in-demand jobs, including adaptive skills needed in an AI era. 

Our intention must be to use AI to tap into all our talents, augment human skills, accelerate skill development, and boost the agility with which millions of workers translate skills into economic mobility, learning into earning. Don’t blame the tools, change the rules.

I recently heard a powerful ‘intentions matter’ example earlier this year at ASU+GSV when I hosted a panel called “Skills Over Degrees: the STARs Revolution in Hiring” with experts from Indeed Google McKinsey & Company and Tallo. To no surprise, AI’s impact on hiring was a major part of the conversation - STAR and Tear the Paper Ceiling champion Carolyn Pierce of McKinsey reflected on this moment:

“When the rise of online applications began in the early 2000s, I don’t think people sat in a room and decided, ‘Let’s require a bachelor’s degree to exclude most of the workforce.’ It happened by accident. But here’s the thing—we are the people in that room today. And this time, we have the opportunity to make different decisions.” - Carolyn Pierce, Partner, McKinsey & Company and STAR

We need to take seriously the reality that you don't say, "you have a bachelor's degree, here's the job." Rather, you want to assess skills and qualities. Well, why can't you do that for everyone? We have a heuristic that was developed in the early 2000s when all you had was keyword search filters. Now we have big data. Now we have AI. There's absolutely no reason why we should limit ourselves to these screens.

As I told WorkShift reporter Paul Fain when asked why I’m optimistic about AI:

“We’ve got too many problems to solve…We need all the talents to solve them.”