Exploring the Role of AI in Career Access through a Social Justice Lens

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social justice implications for career guidance of the emerging technologies of career access. Emerging recruitment and selection practices - such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) analysis of candidates’ social media presence and performance in interview, and the use of bots or virtual agents interacting with prospective candidates to evaluate, shortlist and profile them - demonstrate the complexity of contemporary career access in highly technological societies. Career guidance practice has become highly digitalised, and guidance practice likewise can include the use of AI. This paper compares the uses of AI in career guidance and in human resource management and provides an analysis of emerging practices through synthesis of the extant research. With the emerging practices sketched, the paper then outlines the social justice and ethical risks of the increased reliance on AI in career access. The analysis here highlights the need to consider how to avoid reinscribing existing inequities in the emerging digitalised processes of career access, education, and guidance. The nascent nature of AI augmented recruitment and guidance represents not only an educative opportunity for career guidance professionals but also suggests an advocacy role. As legislation and ethics around the use of AI for recruitment is underdeveloped there is an opportunity for career guidance professionals and educators to provide input into the ethical guidelines and regulation of the use of AI in employment and in their practice.