Maybe I'm just paranoid and have low expectations for humanity, but I think the main demand for video interviews would be to do racial/ethnic/attractiveness discrimination on candidates. Early in the process, it would be a lot easier to discard all people of [unfavored group] without any allegations of unfairness.
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I think you have very low expectations for humanity indeed if you think that will be the main way companies use something so useful.
imho we are past the point where that's the main way people will use this tool, but we're not past the point where it's not happening anymore. And we are clearly not past the point where people assume it will happen.
Job boards are broken, and this is a good step in the right direction, and I wish them the best.
I would caution though against not looking at the discrimination piece head on, and addressing it clearly.
The reality is, video interviews do make it much easier, and less costly to discriminate, and easier to hide it. People who have been targets of discrimination might be less hesitant to use them. This might skew the candidate base...etc.
I don't have any good ideas about how to address this, and I'm excited about these guys making a dent in how we hire, but I do not think you can take more than a few steps in this direction without directly addressing its possible (and probable) misuse.
Well, if someone wants to discriminate, they can do so regardless. I think it's much more insidious how people unconsciously can disregard people based on first impression. It's sort of the case of "anchoring" -- if you form an initial impression, maybe just based on someone's clothes or mannerisms, it's likely to bias your final impression. (See lesswrong.com for many discussions about this.) Without the video, the first impression is more likely to be based on actual facts as opposed to personal judgment.
I also worried about this problem.
But as Bruce Schneier often says, technology makes it easier for the bad guys to be bad; that doesn't mean the technology itself is bad.
Discrimination is a serious problem with all hiring -- people discriminate when they read names on resumes, speak with people on the phone, and when people come in for interviews. Like most tools, HireHive could be misused. We hope though that it will overall help people shine through who don't look super impressive on paper but are in fact awesome.
Bad discrimination will cost the company lot of money. Good discrimination will make the company lot of money.
If a company discriminate based on race, they will get the kind of performance they deserve.
I'm perplexed by your statement about there being "Good" and "Bad" discrimination. In this context, discrimination means judging someone based on their looks or other visible features from their video. If nobody believes they should be judged by whether they're male/female, minorities, religious, attractive/ugly, etc., why would there ever be "Good" discrimination?
I can think of some (admittedly contrived) scenarios where being allowed to discriminate on illegal-in-the-US traits would be beneficial to the company. For instance, I think women would be much more willing to buy undergarments from women than (especially, unattractive) men. There are definitely people with a preference about the sex of their doctor. There are lots of documented studies about attractive people being more successful in management and sales, so especially if the hire is viewed as a long-term career move, hiring an unattractive person might be objectively inferior.
There are specific, legal, questions you could ask which would be ok ("how many years of experience do you have with bras?", various technical questions, etc.) which might correlate highly with certain physical characteristics.
I think there is a moral argument against discrimination on these grounds, but there's also an argument for letting companies make their own decisions.
Even without legal prohibitions on discrimination, I wouldn't want to create a workplace where this kind of discrimination happened -- even if it were good for a specific job, it would also drive away other candidates for other jobs, and I think the net loss would be greater.
The boarder definition of discrimination is well...judgement.
"In this context, discrimination means judging someone based on their looks or other visible features from their video." -- I think that is the point where ou disagree. You are also discriminating when you separate the wheat from the chaff.
Discrimination can be done by employees even if it's not a company-wide policy.
This was my first thought as well, specifically with regards to weight discrimination which is now on par with race discrimination.
'cept you can change your weight, but not your race.