Aon’s AI Hiring Tools Are Discriminatory, ACLU Says in FTC Complaint

(Bloomberg) — The American Civil Liberties Union alleged in a complaint to regulators that a large consulting firm is selling AI-based hiring tools that discriminate against job candidates based on disability and race, despite marketing these services to companies as “prejudiced”. free.”

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Aon Consulting, Inc., a company that works with Fortune 500 companies and sells a combination of applicant screening software, has made false or misleading claims that its tools are “fair,” free from bias, and can “increase diversity,” alleged the ACLU in a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday, a copy of which was reviewed by Bloomberg.

In its complaint, the ACLU said Aon’s algorithm-based personality test, ADEPT-15, relies on questions that negatively impact autistic and neurodivergent people, as well as people with mental disabilities. Aon also offers an AI video interviewing system and a gamified cognitive assessment service that is likely to discriminate based on race and disability, according to the complaint.

The ACLU is asking the FTC to open an investigation into Aon’s practices, issue an injunction, and provide other necessary relief to affected parties. “We are committed to building solutions that enable our customers to make inclusive hiring decisions,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg. “The design and implementation of our assessment solutions – which customers use in addition to other screening and analysis – follows industry best practices as well as EEOC legal and professional guidelines. We are monitoring new and proposed laws and regulatory guidance to ensure our solutions remain compliant.” The spokesperson also rejected the ACLU’s characterization of its personality test, saying Aon designed the system to avoid measuring clinical characteristics of autistic and neurodivergent individuals, consistent with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

A growing body of research and reports, including an analysis from Bloomberg News, has found that artificial intelligence tools are prone to bias and can have far-reaching, unintended consequences for HR and hiring. But the technology is being actively marketed in these sectors as a solution to speed up recruitment. In an executive order last year, President Biden highlighted the risk that AI could exacerbate hiring discrimination. To date, however, there has been little federal action on this issue.

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Aon isn’t the only company providing AI-powered candidate screening software for companies. The automated applicant tracking systems industry has been around for more than a decade and includes other players such as human resources consulting firms Towers Watson & Co. and Mercer Human Resource Consulting LLC. But the ACLU, by reviewing publicly available technical documentation about Aon’s systems and other materials, was able to zero in on what it considered to be issues of bias built into Aon’s software.

The ACLU said the order is part of its broader effort to address discrimination issues arising from AI hiring software and other automated technologies. “It’s a fundamental priority,” Olga Akselrod, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s racial justice program, said in an interview. “The ACLU and other civil rights groups are watching this space closely and are prepared to act.”

A months-long investigation

The ACLU said Aon first came to its attention when the group agreed to represent an autistic, biracial job seeker who encountered some of Aon’s assessment services during an application process. The ACLU began an investigation into the company’s practices around September.

In one example, the ACLU said it discovered that part of Aon’s ADEPT-15 personality test asked test takers to choose between two statements about their personality with which they most agreed, on a spectrum. Some of the test’s claims have significant overlap with claims from screening tools commonly used by doctors to aid in identifying autistic traits and to support a diagnosis, the ACLU said. (Aon pushed back on this characterization.)

“You can’t discount the impact of hearing these questions that are so closely related to a disability that you have and just feeling like the employer and the provider are targeting you,” said Brian Dimmick, senior attorney in the ACLU’s disability rights department. . program. “This greatly reinforces the discrimination that people with autism and other mental health disabilities already face every day.”

In another example, the ACLU found that documentation from gridChallenge, Aon’s gamified cognitive assessment tool, showed that applicants who were Asian, Black, Hispanic, or Latino, or of two or more ethnicities, had, on average, lower scores than their counterparts. white evaluators. The greatest disparity in average scores occurred between white and black candidates who took the assessment, the ACLU said.

“People with disabilities and people of color already face significant barriers in the job market and the workplace,” Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said in a statement. “Aon’s employment tools exacerbate this discrimination under the misleading guise of reducing bias.”

Once the ACLU discovered these findings, it filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces the laws that made discrimination illegal in the workplace. At some point after this change, Aon made some of its technical documentation inaccessible to the public, Akselrod said.

“Shown off”

Aon’s global clients include Procter & Gamble, Deloitte and parts of Amazon. The ACLU noted that Aon’s marketing materials state that annually the company administers “more than 30 million assessments in more than 40 languages ​​in 90 countries.” Although the consulting firm provides a range of human resources services to employers around the world, the ACLU said it is unclear which of Aon’s clients use the specific services the organization identified in its investigation.

Companies that rely on Aon to hire software not only risk losing highly qualified candidates, but also people who could bring diversity and a special perspective to the workforce that would otherwise be missing, Dimmick said. Candidates, meanwhile, are missing out on vital opportunities – and they may not even know it. “People aren’t getting jobs they’re qualified for, and in many cases, they’re not even having their qualifications judged by humans — they’re just evaluated by these tools,” Dimmick said. “They may never know why they were excluded.”

Larkin Taylor-Parker, legal director at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said she has typically seen AI-based assessment tools appear in entry-level roles.

“What this ends up doing is preventing members of our community from starting out in life and doing even the most menial types of jobs imaginable,” she said. “This has a very real economic impact on people with disabilities in this country.”

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