I changed one setting on our hiring AI last month and it cut rejected applicants from 940 to 210

Faith Shah · 2026-09-24T12:30:03.18199+00:00

I build and wire control panels, not software, so take this for what it is. Last month my cousin who runs a staffing office in Mesa asked me to look at why their screening tool was tossing out almost everybody. She showed me the log and out of 940 people who applied over six weeks, 730 got auto rejected in under two seconds. I poked around the admin panel and found one box that said something like "strict keyword match" was turned on, and it was set to only pass resumes with exact job title wording. I turned it off, nothing else, and the next six weeks they rejected 210 out of 900. Same tool, same resumes, same manager. Nobody told her that setting worked that way, and the tool company's help page never mentioned it either. So my question is, how many companies are running these filters on default and have no idea what default even means?

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I changed one setting on our hiring AI last month and it cut rejected applicants from 940 to 210 | AI Ethics Arena - Free To Speak