Values in Emotion Artificial Intelligence Hiring Services: Technosolutions to Organizational Problems

Despite debates about emotion artificial intelligence’s (EAI) validity, legality, and social consequences, EAI is increasingly present in the high stakes context of hiring, with potential to shape the future of work and the workforce. The values laden in technology play a significant role in its societal impact. We conducted qualitative content analysis on the public-facing websites (N =229) of EAI hiring services. We identify the organizational problems that EAI hiring services claim to solve and reveal the values emerging in desired EAI uses as promoted by EAI hiring services to solve organizational problems. Our findings show that EAI hiring services market their technologies as technosolutions to three purported organizational hiring problems: 1) hiring (in)accuracy, 2) hiring (mis)fit, and 3) hiring (in)authenticity. We unpack these problems to expose how these desired uses of EAI are legitimized by the corporate ideals of data-driven decision making, continuous improvement, precision, loyalty, and stability. We identify the unfair and deceptive mechanisms by which EAI hiring services claim to solve the purported organizational hiring problems, suggesting that they unfairly exclude and exploit job candidates through EAI’s creation, extraction, and affective commodification of a candidate’s affective value through pseudoscientific approaches. Lastly, we interrogate EAI hiring service claims to reveal the core values that underpin their stated desired use: techno-omnipresence, techno-omnipotence, and techno-omniscience. We show how EAI hiring services position desired use of their technology as a moral imperative for hiring organizations with supreme capabilities to solve organizational hiring problems, then discuss implications for fairness, ethics, and policy in EAI-enabled hiring within the US policy landscape.