Ineligible to Serve — Getting A Job

Blake Morrell
2 min readMar 31, 2021

Ineligible to Serve, Getting a Job is Chapter 6 of Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. This section of the book details how pernicious feedback loops are created due to optimizing systems, tracking data, and profits.

Kyle Behm left university due to overriding bipolar disorder. Trying to get a job at Kroger, Walmart, and Home Depot, he was ‘red lighted’ due to personality tests. Kronos is a workforce management company based outside of Boston that makes personality tests. It is centered around the “Five Factor Model” which grades “people on extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to ideas.” Kyle had an almost perfect SAT and was at Vanderbilt a few years ago. How could he have been denied work at so many companies?

Feedback loops are created when applicants are unaware of what the résumé scanner or personality test is searching for. The opaqueness makes it hard to know what’s taking place behind the scenes. Usually “the wealthy and informed get the edge and the poor are more likely to lose out.” This isn’t just for individuals trying to find work. Cathy describes the barriers put up by search engines that effect small businesses. Google reviews can obliterate anyone who is unable to ‘log on’, pushing competitors much farther up the algorithmic food chain. It reminds me of the time when someone explained how Yelp is essentially the online review mafia. If you don’t pay them handsomely you are excluded from making it onto their website full of reviews and publicity. Buy in or you can’t play.

It’s fun to analyze the past and admit our mistakes. An illiterate computer was used in the 1970’s to filter out applications due grammatical errors. Maybe instead of denying applicants due to language barriers, we can teach them. Just like countries having success with drug rehabilitation instead of incrassation, nurturing is superior to punishing bad behavior.

Along with nurture, it would be ideal to focus on blind applications where “geography, gender, race, or name” don’t weigh on the process.

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