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Joy English

C1 Listening

C1Ethics and technology25 min

A seminar on automated job screening

A professor and two students debate whether automated tools can sort job applications fairly, and what safeguards an organisation would need.

Before you listen

You are going to hear part of a university seminar. A professor leads the discussion, and two students, Marco and Lin, take different positions on a case study. Listen for who agrees with whom, for the reasons they give, and for the task set at the end.

auditverb
to examine a system or record officially to check that it is accurate and fairAn outside team will audit the selection process.
opacitynoun
the quality of being impossible to see into or understandCritics object to the opacity of the scoring system.
snap judgementnoun
a decision made very quickly without careful thoughtSnap judgements are rarely fair to nervous candidates.
safeguardnoun
a rule or measure that protects people from harmThe policy includes a safeguard for applicants who disagree.

Listen · 2:23

University seminar: can a program hire fairly?

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Show the transcript (try the questions first)

Professor Siddiqui: Last week we looked at how automated tools sort job applications. This week I'd like your reactions to the case study. Marco, you've read it. Was the company wrong to use the system?

Marco: Not necessarily wrong, though I'd say careless. The company claimed the software was objective because it had no opinions. But it had learned from ten years of past hiring decisions, and if those decisions favoured a certain kind of candidate, the system simply reproduced the pattern, only faster.

Lin: I'd push back a little. Human recruiters are hardly neutral. One study in the reading found that people reviewing applications spent an average of seven seconds on each one, which suggests plenty of snap judgements. At least a program can be audited.

Professor Siddiqui: An important distinction. Can it be audited in practice?

Lin: That depends on whether anyone is allowed to look inside. In this case the supplier refused, saying the method was a trade secret, so the company couldn't explain its own rejections.

Marco: Which seems to me the real scandal. Had the company been able to explain a decision, a rejected applicant could have challenged it. As it was, people were turned away by a process nobody could describe.

Professor Siddiqui: So the objection is not to the technology as such, but to its opacity.

Lin: Mostly, yes, though I'd add that efficiency is being mistaken for fairness. Ten thousand applications in a week is a cost problem, and the tool solves the cost problem. Whether it's fair is a separate matter that nobody was obliged to answer.

Marco: I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. Some firms do test their tools carefully. The difficulty is that they test for the biases they already know about.

Professor Siddiqui: Which brings us to your assignment. I'd like each of you to draft a one-page policy for a small organisation that wants to use such a tool. I don't want a ban, and I don't want blind enthusiasm. What safeguards would you require? Think about who should be able to see the results, how often the system should be reviewed, and what an applicant is entitled to ask.

Lin: Can the policy include a human decision at the end?

Professor Siddiqui: Certainly, but be specific about what that person actually does. A human who merely clicks approve on a machine's recommendation is not much of a safeguard.

Exercise 1 of 2

Attitude, opinion and inference

Listen and choose the best answer. Some answers are not stated directly.

  1. What is Marco's main criticism of the company?

  2. What point is Lin making about human recruiters?

  3. What does the figure of seven seconds suggest to Lin?

  4. What prevented the company from auditing the tool?

  5. Why does Marco call the lack of explanation "the real scandal"?

  6. What does Lin mean by saying efficiency is "mistaken for fairness"?

  7. What reservation does Marco express about testing?

  8. What does the professor imply about a human decision at the end of the process?

0 of 8 answered

Exercise 2 of 2

Listen for details

Listen again and type the missing word or number. You can write numbers as words or digits.

  1. The software had learned from years of past hiring decisions.

  2. Reviewers spent an average of seconds on each application.

  3. The supplier described its method as a trade .

  4. Lin describes applications in a week as a cost problem.

  5. Each student must draft a -page policy.

0 of 5 answered

Source

Original script by Joy English, read by open-source text-to-speech voices (Kokoro-82M, Apache-2.0).

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