Automated hiring platforms as mythmaking machines and their symbolic economy

Automated hiring platforms offer critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers a privileged site for the study of technological controversies and their unfolding as they often end up entangled in scandals. In 2019, an official complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) outlines the main controversy created by such systems, directly targeting HireVue’s platform. According to the FTC, these systems “evaluate a job applicant’s qualifications based upon their appearance by means of an opaque, proprietary algorithm” (FTC, 2019, p.1). Existing critical literature outlines how Basic Emotions theory (Ekman, 1999) and its deployment through an AI-powered system fuel ventures such as automated hiring platforms (Stark, 2018). Therein lies a form of opportunism where the use of available audiovisual data and the revalorization of heavily criticized and simplistic theories about the human mind create discriminatory automated decision-making grounded in bogus science (Crawford, 2021). Even if HireVue slightly modified its product by removing the video analysis component in reaction to the critiques formulated by regulatory bodies, the company kept AI-powered voice analysis, its one-sided video interview technique and the multitude of gaming assignments designed to evaluate candidates. Going beyond scandals and hype, this article aims to tackle the inevitable political economy generated by automated hiring systems. Indeed, job seekers are confronted with a system that disrupts a well-established, sociologically stable technique, the interview, and its technical object counterpart, the resume. We assert that the gaps of nonknowledge (Beer, 2023) created by the one-sided interviews break the commonly accepted interactionist framework that originally informed the hiring process. Using HireVue as a case study, we lay bare the political economy of AI-powered automated hiring platforms, highlighting how individuals assess their capacity to acquire agency in the face of opaque technologies.