Sociotechnical imaginaries of social inequality in the design and use of AI recruitment technology

Through interviewing 12 companies in Italy which either design (vendors) or use (clients) AI recruitment technology systems, we explore how these companies perceive their systems to interact with issues of social inequality and how these perceptions, in practice, carry societal impacts. Three sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) were consistently embedded within these companies’ visions of this intersection: the third eye, the river, and the car bonnet. Through critically analysing these imaginaries, we find that they exhibit an overriding desire for productivity and talent capture from clients, and a consequential de-prioritisation of addressing social inequality and scrutinising the ways it could be reproduced from both vendors and clients. It demonstrates that the current ‘desired’ futures, shown by the sociotechnical imaginaries which vendors and clients share for AI-tec-tech are really leading us towards an ‘undesirable’ future of hiring which continues to perpetuate social inequality. This study contributes one of the first pieces of empirical work to simultaneously assess the perceptions of AI-rec-tech vendors’ and clients’ surrounding social (in)equality, to shed light on the priorities for design and the motivations for usage, and to reflect upon how this impacts society. This is a significant and original contribution to the evolving body of literature on AI-rec-tech in sociology, critical data studies, and communications.