Job Applicant Gets An AI-Generated Rejection Letter Because The Month & Day Of Their Birthday Is 'Immature & Unprofessional'
Some feel the letter might be fake, but AI mistakes in hiring are becoming an increasingly common problem.
voronaman / Shutterstock.comFor all the miracles generative AI tools like ChatGPT were supposed to bring, so far it seems like they're causing more problems than they're solving.
The job-hunting experience a person on Reddit recently had is a perfect example, and it speaks to a wider and growing problem of how AI is impacting hiring.
The job applicant said they received an absurd AI-generated rejection letter because their birthdate was 'unprofessional.'
The role AI tools are playing in the hiring process is growing exponentially and almost no one is happy about it.
It's causing so many problems, especially in regard to discrimination, that lawmakers all over the world are making moves to regulate or even ban the use of AI tools in hiring altogether.
A viral AI-generated rejection letter circulating the internet is not quite as nefarious as discrimination, but it does present a deeply absurd scenario that illustrates exactly why AI tools in hiring might not be such a great idea.
The AI-generated rejection letter stated the applicant's birthday of April 20 was 'inconsistent with professional standards.'
If you've ever spent a significant amount of time job-hunting, you've probably experienced an applicant tracking system's automatic rejection letter plopping in your inbox so fast after submitting your application that you immediately knew that no one so much as glanced at it.
They're not uncommon, but they're infuriating nonetheless. And the one a Redditor said they received was infuriating on a whole other level. The entire basis on which they were rejected was because their birth date, April 20, or 4/20, is a sort of "holiday" and slang term among marijuana enthusiasts.
Photo: Reddit
"Upon reviewing your application materials," the letter read, "we found that the information provided in regards to your birthdate on LinkedIn, specifically 4/20, seems inconsistent with the professional standards we uphold in our organization."
The letter went on to call the birth date unprofessional, immature, and misaligned with the company's values of respect, professionalism, and inclusivity."
The letter struck a nerve because it spoke to inklings many job seekers have. That ceding the hiring process over to computers without human common sense has made job-hunting feel like an impossible climb over an impenetrable wall. So much so that apparently even a birth date can get you rejected.
The AI-generated rejection letter is suspected to be fake, but the problems it speaks to in job search and hiring processes are very real.
There are some subtle indications that this letter might not be real. For one, LinkedIn isn't capitalized, and it contains other grammatical errors that, presumably, would be caught by a regular applicant tracking system, let alone an AI.
But the point the poster is likely trying to make with this letter, whether it's real or not, still stands: AI is causing real problems in the hiring process.
Most notably, it has been found to not only reify but worsen discriminatory practices by using a company's current hiring patterns as models for how to approach new applicants, as happened at Amazon a few years back. Its AI took Amazon's dearth of female employees as a directive to weed out all female applicants.
AI hiring tools have also been found to frequently misunderstand and penalize gaps in employment on resumes, and to misread speech accents, facial expressions, and body language. And surprise — AIs struggled with the latter issues far more often with darker-skinned applicants than white job seekers.
The problems are significant enough that New York City, as well as the states of Illinois and Maryland, have passed laws limiting and regulating the use of AI in hiring. Similar laws are in process in California, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Washington D.C.
And the European Union just passed a sweeping law that heavily regulates nearly all uses of AI, and mandates human oversight in the case of its use in hiring.
Still, as corporations and employers seek ever more ways to cut costs in service of greater profits, AI in hiring likely isn't going anywhere.
And given how much of a boondoggle AI has already made of the job search process, the real problem isn't whether this AI-generated rejection letter is real or fake. It's that being rejected from a job for such a laughably absurd mistake — one no human being would ever make — feels entirely plausible.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.