Explainable Multi-Stakeholder Job Recommender Systems

Public opinion on recommender systems has become increasingly wary in recent years. In line with this trend, lawmakers have also started to become more critical of such systems, resulting in the introduction of new laws focusing on aspects such as privacy, fairness, and explainability for recommender systems and AI at large. These concepts are especially crucial in high-risk domains such as recruitment. In recruitment specifically, decisions carry substantial weight, as the outcomes can significantly impact individuals' careers and companies' success. Additionally, there is a need for a multi-stakeholder approach, as these systems are used by job seekers, recruiters, and companies simultaneously, each with its own requirements and expectations. In this paper, I summarize my current research on the topic of explainable, multi-stakeholder job recommender systems and set out a number of future research directions.

Creating Healthy Friction: Determining Stakeholder Requirements of Job Recommendation Explanations

The increased use of information retrieval in recruitment, primarily through job recommender systems (JRSs), can have a large impact on job seekers, recruiters, and companies. As a result, such systems have been determined to be high-risk in recent legislature. This requires JRSs to be trustworthy and transparent, allowing stakeholders to understand why specific recommendations were made. To fulfill this requirement, the stakeholders' exact preferences and needs need to be determined. To do so, we evaluated an explainable job recommender system using a realistic, task-based, mixed-design user study (n=30) in which stakeholders had to make decisions based on the model's explanations. This mixed-methods evaluation consisted of two objective metrics - correctness and efficiency, along with three subjective metrics - trust, transparency, and usefulness. These metrics were evaluated twice per participant, once using real explanations and once using random explanations. The study included a qualitative analysis following a think-aloud protocol while performing tasks adapted to each stakeholder group. We find that providing stakeholders with real explanations does not significantly improve decision-making speed and accuracy. Our results showed a non-significant trend for the real explanations to outperform the random ones on perceived trust, usefulness, and transparency of the system for all stakeholder types. We determine that stakeholders benefit more from interacting with explanations as decision support capable of providing healthy friction, rather than as previously-assumed persuasive tools.

A Co-design Study for Multi-Stakeholder Job Recommender System Explanations

Recent legislation proposals have significantly increased the demand for eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in many businesses, especially in so-called `high-risk' domains, such as recruitment. Within recruitment, AI has become commonplace, mainly in the form of job recommender systems (JRSs), which try to match candidates to vacancies, and vice versa. However, common XAI techniques often fall short in this domain due to the different levels and types of expertise of the individuals involved, making explanations difficult to generalize. To determine the explanation preferences of the different stakeholder types - candidates, recruiters, and companies - we created and validated a semi-structured interview guide. Using grounded theory, we structurally analyzed the results of these interviews and found that different stakeholder types indeed have strongly differing explanation preferences. Candidates indicated a preference for brief, textual explanations that allow them to quickly judge potential matches. On the other hand, hiring managers preferred visual graph-based explanations that provide a more technical and comprehensive overview at a glance. Recruiters found more exhaustive textual explanations preferable, as those provided them with more talking points to convince both parties of the match. Based on these findings, we describe guidelines on how to design an explanation interface that fulfills the requirements of all three stakeholder types. Furthermore, we provide the validated interview guide, which can assist future research in determining the explanation preferences of different stakeholder types.