How helpful would it have been for you to know the salary of that job, or at least the possible salary range, before have you gone through the entire application and application process? There’s an AI for that.
It’s clear that employers are hesitant to reveal salaries at the hiring stage, but researchers at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence are helping to overcome this barrier using AI, allowing potential employees to decide for themselves which job openings are worth their time. (through Venture Beat (opens in new tab)†
The process involves training the AI on a dataset of more than a million job openings, allowing it to “use the text of job postings to evaluate the salary-relevant characteristics of jobs in near real time.”
It does this with an accuracy of 87%, compared to the 69% it got from just using the job titles and location.
A survey of 6,000 professionals in the UK found that 81% of our salaries cite as: the most important factor (opens in new tab) in finding a new job, and yet the problem of income transparency remains. Employers just don’t want to keep you informed about compensation, despite the fact that vacancies with stated salaries tend to produce twice as many successful candidates (opens in new tab)†
The BBC reports that in 2019 only 12.6% of companies worldwide revealed the salary range in vacancies (opens in new tab)†
That number is growing, but not nearly fast enough. The report goes on to explain that companies that announce their pay soon can attract better, more diverse talent, making salary transparency a useful way to create a more equitable workplace.
This year on International Women’s Day, the British government has announced an initiative (opens in new tab) to improve transparency in the application process, to help women negotiate fairer salaries. In any case, steps are being taken in the right direction. But what if there was a way to predict a job’s salary just by analyzing the job description?
Sarah Bana of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab is the one training AI to predict these kinds of salaries. her research (opens in new tab) (PDF warning) proves that since “text in job postings is written in plain language”, it is entirely possible to predict their salary using a technique called “transfer learning”.
Essentially, the AI could give potential employees more opportunities to pick and choose jobs, rather than apply to everything just to be disappointed. She says it will “make job applications more transparent and improve our approach to staff education and training”.
Sounds great to me, and it will give people even more insight into the value of upskilling by specifying which skills are most sought after by employers. So anyone who chooses a future career path can hone their skills based on how much dollars they can earn from it.
Ah, the marriage of AI and capitalism at its best.