Increasingly, modern workers are finding that companies are no longer content with looking at their resumes, cover letters, and job performance. More and more, employers want to evaluate their brains.

Companies screen potential job candidates with technology-assisted cognitive and personality tests, deploy wearable technology to monitor brain activity on the job and use artificial intelligence to make decisions about hiring, promoting and firing employees. The brain has become the workplace’s ultimate sorting hat – the technological version of the magical device that dispenses young witches between the Hogwarts houses in the “Harry Potter” series.

comp The promotion of technological tools to assess the brains of applicants promises to “significantly increase the quality of employment” by measuring “the building blocks of the way we think and act”. They claim their tools can do that Reduce bias in recruitment by “relying solely on cognitive ability”.

But research has shown that such assessments can lead to racial disparities.”three to five times greater of other predictors of job performance.” When social and emotional tests are part of the battery, so might they Examination of people with autism and various other candidates. Applicants may be asked to disclose their thoughts and emotions through AI-based recruitment tools without fully understanding the implications of the data collected. With recent surveys showing that More than 40% of companies Using assessments of cognitive ability in employment, federal employment regulators are starting to take notice.

Once the workers are hired, the new wearables are put into use Incorporating brain assessment into the workplace Worldwide to monitor attention and Productivity record At work. the Smart Cap tracks worker stress, Enten headphones from Neurable Enhance focus and MN8 Emotive Headphones It promises to monitor your employees’ “stress and attention levels using… proprietary machine learning algorithms” — though, the company stresses, they “can’t read thoughts or feelings.”

The increasing use of brain-guided wearables in the workplace will pressure managers to use the insights from them to inform hiring and promotion decisions. we are prone to The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations of complex human phenomena and their attraction to measurement Even when we don’t know what we should measure.

Relying on AI-based cognitive and personality tests can lead to simplistic explanations of human behavior that ignore the broader social and cultural factors that shape the human experience and predict success in the workplace. A software engineer’s cognitive assessment may test spatial and analytical skills but ignore the ability to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds. The temptation is to turn human thinking and feeling into puzzle pieces that can be appropriately categorized.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission appears to have awakened these potential problems. It has recently issued an enforcement draft Guidelines about “Technology-related employment discrimination,” including the use of technology in “staffing, selection, or production and performance management tools.”

While the commission has yet to spell out how employers can comply with non-discrimination laws while using technology assessments, it should work to ensure that cognitive and personality testing is limited to employment-related skills lest it intrude on employees’ mental privacy.

The increased power of these tools may tempt employers to “hack” candidates’ brains and screen them based on beliefs and biases, assuming that such decisions are not unlawfully discriminatory because they are not directly based on protected characteristics. Facebook “Likes” can already be used Inferring sexual orientation and race with great precision. Political affiliation and religious beliefs can be determined just as easily. As wearables and brain health software begin to track mental processes over time, age-related cognitive decline will also become detectable.

All of this points to the urgent need for regulators to develop specific rules governing the use of cognitive and personality tests in the workplace. Employers should be required to obtain informed consent from candidates before they undergo a cognitive and personality assessment, including clear disclosure of how candidate data is collected, stored, shared and used. Regulators should also require that assessments be regularly tested for validity and reliability to ensure that they are accurate, repeatable, and related to work performance and outcomes — and not overly sensitive to factors such as fatigue, stress, mood, or medication.

Assessment tools should also be reviewed regularly to ensure that they do not discriminate against candidates on the basis of age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, thoughts or emotions. Companies that develop and administer these tests must update them regularly to account for changing contextual and cultural factors.

More broadly, we must consider whether these methods of assessing job applicants reinforce overly reductive views of human capabilities. This is especially true because the capabilities of human operators are frequently compared to those of generative AI.

While the use of cognitive and personality assessments is not new, the increasing development of neurotechnology and AI-based tools for decoding the human brain raises important ethical and legal questions about cognitive freedom.

The minds and personalities of employees must be subject to the strictest protection. While these new tests may offer some benefits to employers, they must not come at the expense of workers’ privacy, dignity and freedom of thought.

Nita Farahani is Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University and author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.