Pymetrics: AI Could Cut Hiring Biases as Companies Make Push to Find Workers, Proponents Say

02.02.2022 - New York

Wall Street Journal

Frida Polli, CEO of Pymetrics Inc., said that though some systems can replicate human biases, others can help companies weed bias out. Pymetrics, which counts McDonald’s Corp. and Kraft Heinz Co. among its clients, uses games to evaluate candidates’ attributes such as their attention and risk tolerance, and to determine whether they would fit a particular job.

Dr. Polli, who worked as a neuroscientist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Pymetrics’s algorithms have been audited by experts from Northeastern University to ensure they don’t inadvertently discriminate.

The tests don’t necessarily have right or wrong answers, but can help direct, for example, a methodical person to a job that suits such a personality, assisting companies in finding candidates who might otherwise be overlooked.

Some candidates—such as people who didn’t go to college, didn’t get good grades or don’t know someone already working at a company—might be suited for a job but not discovered in a labor-intensive process where recruiters are forced to make fast decisions and quickly rule out scores of candidates, Dr. Polli said.

“I love humans,’’ Dr. Polli said. ”I don’t think we should be, you know, disintermediating humans anytime soon. [But] there’s no research that supports the idea that humans are unbiased.”

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