The automated literacies of e-recruitment and online services

Abstract Online technologies have entered almost all spheres of life, introducing new challenges to how literacies are theorised, defined and taken up in adult literacy education settings. This process has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and on a global scale, as more services, resources and information move online. An important, if under-studied example of this trend is e-recruitment. Job seekers increasingly rely upon automated platforms to find and apply for jobs, and their fate in these selection processes are often automated. Drawing on data from the German LEO study and ethnographic interviews with job seekers in community-based digital literacy classes in Canada, this article explores how adult job seekers experience e-recruitment platforms, examining promises of efficiency, convenience and fairness in light of embedded inequalities within algorithmic agencies. Located within constructs of digital inequality, new literacy studies and sociomaterial literacies, findings suggest the need to reconfigure skills discourses, literacy measurement projects, and literacies education to account for automated intelligences as new actors in the literacies landscape.