JP Morgan Ending Campus Visits
In a Bloomberg article last week, JP Morgan announced that it will begin using online behavioral science-based games to recruit college students.
"Beginning this year, the bank will be using the games, instead of in person campus recruiting and traditional college campus visits, to gauge and measure the interest and acumen of college students who seek to apply for jobs at the bank. The games will be in addition to video interviews that the bank has started using in recent years".J.P. Morgan wrote in a letter to colleges that the new system will help "provide greater consistency and equitability for all who applied".
Any opinions on how this might change the game of recruitment in the long run if more companies decide to follow suit? How many of you have gotten opportunities via campus recruitment?
Totally against it, dehumanizes the process. Sounds like an HR / SJW power play to save costs and take over the process from people who do the job for a living.
Will help schmoozers and well connected students even more! Those will be the ones with family connections, network of analysts working in industry already, able to fly out to the city to have coffee chats in person, etc. Also being "fair" now means only looking at your resume versus a holistic view of your character. Hope you're at a target with a top GPA!
Here's https://careers.jpmorgan.com/US/en/about-us/news-and-stories/how-we-hire</a">straight from JPM's website: "Its matching engine uses supervised machine learning and an auditing technique called AuditAI that creates gender and ethnic fairness in algorithms. Millions of candidates have interacted with the games and other employers have experienced dramatic improvements in the diversity of their entry-level hiring."
EDIT: Diving deeper into the rabbit hole of pymetrics. So here's how I understand it works:
A bunch (80-100) top investment banking performers take a standardized test.
The computer will analyze the traits of the top performers, such as risk taking, multitasking, etc.
The AI will see if these traits are also correlated with demographic trends and correct / penalize against that when applicants in the future take the test. For example, if the top performing white males JPM hired are risk takers and that predicts performance at JPM, in the future if a white male scores high on risk taking, which would normally predict high performance at JPM, the algorithm will lower the candidate's overall score to promote gender/ethnic fairness because that trait is seen to merely correlate with whiteness/maleness versus be actually predictive of performance. Attribution analysis paralysis abounds!
pymetrics Lead Data Scientist: “We look at what traits make that population [top performers] unique, and sometimes those traits might be predictive not of job performance but the homogeneity of the people who went through it,” [pymetrics Lead Data Scientist] Baker said. “And so we use Audit AI to make sure that we don’t overweight any traits that are actually more predictive of a certain demographic group.”
Anyone still trust Silicon Valley to figure out how to hire investment bankers?
https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/31/pymetrics-open-sources-audit-ai-an-a…</a">https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/31/pymetrics-open-sources-audit-ai-an-a…
Also, why isn't every white person now claiming Native American since it is apparently ok for Liz Warren to do it?
Classic example of trying to create Equality of Outcome instead of Equality of Opportunity. The more meritocracy erodes in our country, the more disenfranchised top performers become. This leads to reduced workforce participation and social unrest.
Companies should not be allowed to ask for race, gender, or sexuality information on applications. The best candidates should be awarded interviews based on a system of meritocracy. There should be no affirmative action given. This is how our civilization continues to progress, otherwise we start to degrade.
Before accepting my current job I applied to Goldman Sachs. On the application it asked me (on a dedicated page) whether or not I was an LGBTQ+ person and then whether or not I was a trans-gendered person. What bearing does this have on my ability to do a job? What kind of culture prioritizes individuals based on their sexual preference?
I ended up being contacted by a Managing Director directly to interview with him, and I am so glad I had already found another position. Why would I want join a work culture that demonizes and handicaps me, a straight white Christian male, as some sort of "privileged" person? Everyone should be judged equally based solely on merit.
The whole point is that some demographics tend to on average have a more privileged history than others. For example, you cannot deny that America's racist history still has reverberating effects which at least partially causes the comparatively lower education achievements of blacks. Therefore there is no equality of opportunity.
Also, just because a job application asks if you are LGBTQ does not mean that if you aren't then you are being demonized or handicapped. Look around wall street and you will still see that white males make up the largest proportion of the population.
Well firstly, you can choose whether or not to disclose that information i.e sexual orientation. There is almost always a box that says 'Do not wish to answer'. Secondly, I think you might need to ask yourself what exactly you mean by 'merit' - most of the kids getting into IB are not getting in solely based on their 'merit'. A lot of that is who you know and where you went to school - which again, is strongly (far strongly) influenced by other factors than 'merit'.
Yes, the only people where disenfranchisement and social unrest is happening is with highly paid and highly educated professionals who are also white and male.
Nice post. It's a joke. They're doing this for the PR, and probably don't think it'll have any impact on the talent they can hire because they already get so many qualified or over qualified people applying for these jobs.
I don't see how on the one hand it can "dehumanize the process" but also "help schmoozers and well connected students even more". The point of the test is so that the application is less reliant upon knowing someone.
Then to your point 3, I don't see how you can infer that from the quote from the pymetrics lead scientist at all. The scientist said that they don't overweight traits that are that are actually more predictive of a certain demographic group. That implies that if there are traits that actually predict job performance regardless of demographic group, then a candidate displaying that trait would not lead to any lowering of scores. In other words, if risk takers across all demographic groups perform well, then being a risk taker will not lead to your score being lowered regardless if you are a white male or not.
It dehumanizes it for those who can't do in-person networking through alternate means. On-Campus visits means everyone who's on campus gets to meet with the banking team. If you take that away, it advantages those who can network their way outside of the on-campus process. The on-campus visit is about as democratic as I can imagine.
On point 3, pymetrics is open source and they provide a couple examples on their Github. This is not my expert analysis so correct me if I'm wrong and I'll gladly redact.
https://github.com/pymetrics/audit-ai/blob/master/examples/StudentPerfo…</a">Github Example 1: German Credit * In this example, from what I can tell, if the machine learning is trained on data alone, it will notice correctly that people under 30, immigrants, and females are not as credit-worthy as people over 30, German nationals, and males. The algorithm then takes these individual correlations and will use that to "correct" going forward e.g. in the case of a future under-30 applicant, the data predicts they will have worse credit, but the new algorithm won't allow this to be taken into account
https://github.com/pymetrics/audit-ai/blob/master/examples/StudentPerfo…</a">Github Example 2: Student Performance Data Set * Corrects for factors including if a student failed a class before
The Head of Campus Recruiting, Matt Mitro, is ex-Google and a social enterprise founder. Probably a great guy, but so transparent is the motive to inject technology into everything as a solution. The result of this "value-add" legacy will be a recruiting black box that puts JPM off campus. Will it really impact JP Morgan? No, much of the above is hyperbole. But I don't like the precedent this sets.
That's not what it says, the article indicates: "Audit AI is designed to detect bias, but removal of any imbalance in an algorithm is up to the creator."
In other words, you could probably use the data and manipulate it to find concentrated traits that might signal a likelihood towards bias.
Just want to point out, you are basically doing what you claim does not exist, which is to assume that different traits of individuals cannot be productive if they do not line up with your ideal person, or that bias only exists to actively go out of the way to cause harm.
Bias is any concentrated preference for one area or against another, which even preference for something that could be admirable like risk-taking is technically bias, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a race-based trait.
To round things out, I think that because any trait could potentially apply to any racial background, technically, this could have 0 effect on the change in the rates. It might end up meaning, one slightly more risk-averse person who is also white is hired vs a more risk-taking white person, because this person might exhibit a preference towards normal biased behavior.
In other words, it doesn't mean more mixed racial background classes will be the immediate result. Not to me at least.
Systematic racism applies to systems with a history of racism, so that the institution's learned practices and norms inherently incorporate a racial bias/stigma. If institutions were trying to correct plain old racism, the overt kind, they would just wait for someone to call someone else a "ni***r" and then try to enact change by firing that one person.
You can't point to one piece of empirical information and assume that's an example of systematic racism. It's kind of like you can't say the chicken crossed the road only from a biological standpoint, because there are also neurological, evolutionary, and physical implications all involved too. The kind of racism that sticks today is holistic and can't be fixed with one empirical data point.
As far as this specific policy, I don't think it's that crazy. When you look at recruiting today, a lot on this very board make it a point to argue that target schools are no longer a big x factor. So, why wouldn't they make that more official and just modernize the entire approach?
Systematic racism means overt racist present in the system based on how the law applies to individuals. This is gone - see the end of slavery, Jim Crow, school segregation, housing discrimination, etc...
Social racism is based on implicit bias and is impossible to control/measure. The more the media, academia, large corporations, and government try to enforce Equality of Outcome, the more social implicit racism will grow, primarily from blue collar and middle class whites who now actually receive systematic racism in the form affirmative action handicapping and "hate" crime/speech legislation.
The SJW attack on straight white males will heavily backfire by causing a dramatic escalation in white identity politics are a natural and rational counter to minority identity politics. The only solution, like capitalism versus socialism, is to institute a merit-based system which judges individuals in a color blind manner.
No, it really doesn't. It sounds like you're talking about some form of applied racism in the justice system, because that's what is over.
Don't want to argue the definition but I think you are doing a very good job of playing ignorance, hiding behind semantics.
I don't care about fragile egos in the white male community anymore than I care about them in the black male community, or the woman community, for that matter. All of that ego stuff is stupid. Just play your part and do what you can.
Yeah, terrorism from disenfranchisement is nothing new.
EDIT: Also, a “merit-based, color blind system” honestly sounds more Orwellian than reversing systematic racism. After all, it was the freedom to rollout systematic racism that got us here in the first place.
Here we go with the “oh you poor white males” counter . Can we just knock that off? It’s low quality and cheap.
Let’s assume we all agree on the definition of systemic racism and that it exists today. 1) what outcomes will “prove” when it doesn’t exist? 2) do you trust a government or bank or any other entity not to game this to their own ends? Will those ends really help minorities? You sure? 3) based on recent experience (govt policy, HR policies), is it really unreasonable to think the companies could totally hose people even if they have “good intentions”? That’s not the Unified Diasaffected White Male argument, whatever that might look like, it’s common sense.
I think it's important to note boomers were born during Jim Crow.