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Report: AI technologies ‘lack cultural competence and demonstrate bias in hiring’

Upwardly Global - an immigrant advocacy group - says AI has an inconsistent track record in the field of career guidance
By Laura Aka
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With the ongoing conversations around AI, the White House recently issued an Executive Order focused on “safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence.”  

Included in the Executive Order are efforts to support workers, noting, “AI is changing America’s jobs and workplaces, offering both the promise of improved productivity but also the dangers of increased workplace surveillance, bias, and job displacement.”

  • Develop principles and best practices to mitigate the harms and maximize the benefits of AI for workers by addressing job displacement; labor standards; workplace equity, health, and safety; and data collection. These principles and best practices will benefit workers by providing guidance to prevent employers from undercompensating workers, evaluating job applications unfairly, or impinging on workers’ ability to organize.
  • Produce a report on AI’s potential labor-market impacts, and study and identify options for strengthening federal support for workers facing labor disruptions, including from AI.

Response from an Immigrant Advocacy Organization

In a statement, Jina Krause-Vilmar, CEO and president of Upwardly Global, welcomes the White House action, but says, “Let’s be clear. Although emerging AI technologies have potential, they have an inconsistent track record in the field of career guidance. This inconsistency is especially pronounced for immigrants, refugees, and asylees entering the U.S. workforce, as conventional tech solutions for career services fail to meet the unique needs of these populations.”

Jina Krause-Vilmar, CEO and president, Upwardly Global

A recent Upwardly Global report – AI for Impact: How to Thoughtfully Leverage Technology to Deliver on Mission – “points out, these technologies lack cultural competence, fail to adequately recognize skills, demonstrate bias in hiring, and are too expensive,” according to Krause-Vilmar.

She continues, “The consequences of this mismatch carry significant implications for the over two million immigrants, refugees, and asylees who come to the U.S. with professional-level education and experience but find they must work low-wage jobs to survive. Too often, these jobs are fundamentally misaligned with their skills and abilities, leading to financial struggles that affect not only their families but also their broader communities.”

Krause-Vilmar adds, “These outcomes are detrimental to immigrant communities and may also lead to an annual economic loss of up to $10 billion in unrealized tax receipts for the United States.”

Included in the Upwardly Global report:

In testing an AI-powered career navigation tool with 30 resumes from people who previously accessed Upwardly Global’s coaching services, the tool “underperformed on almost every measure.”

The report adds, “Subsequent recommendations for upskilling, training programs, and jobs were therefore ill-suited to the candidates’ actual experiences and education level.”

Among the examples offered in the report, “A candidate from Turkey with a Ph.D. in economics and 10 years of experience in financial analysis, data analysis, and machine learning was recommended for an introductory course on probability and statistics.”

Upwardly Global is “taking a long-term approach and investing in making digital technology a core part of its internal competency.”

Among issues and actions to be addressed:

  • Clarify job seekers’ most crucial needs and identifying AI tools that can best address those needs.
  • AI tools designed for supporting career navigation must be able to recognize and evaluate non-U.S. experience as well as they do for U.S.-centered experience.
  • Ideally, an external AI tool would also seamlessly connect with our own internal database to automate the flow of information about users’ experiences with the tool.
  • Share learnings of  emerging new technologies with the industry so that we all rise together.

Read more about the Upwardly Global report – AI for Impact: How to Thoughtfully Leverage Technology to Deliver on Mission.

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.

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