Should companies be banned from using AI to screen job applications?

There's something corrosive about being evaluated by a machine before any human being has read your name. A resume is already a flattened, anxious little document, a person trying to compress years of effort into one page and hoping to be seen. Running it through a model first turns job seeking into an exercise in pleasing a statistical ghost: tweak the verbs, match the keywords, format for the parser. The human part, the part where someone might notice the unusual career path or the interesting side project, never gets a chance, because the interesting bits are exactly what the model is worst at valuing. Pew Research found broad public opposition to AI making final hiring decisions (Pew), and I think that instinct is wiser than the efficiency argument. Work is one of the main ways people participate in society. The gateway to it should involve being perceived by another person, not scored by software.