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Rant: Someone told me my hiring algorithm was racist and I had to fix it

A data scientist at our company pointed out our resume screener was rejecting candidates from 3 ZIP codes in Detroit at 4 times the rate of suburbs. Turns out the model was using home address as a proxy for credit history without us even realizing. I rewrote the whole thing to ignore location data entirely and now our hire pool is way more diverse. Has anyone else run into hidden bias like this in their own systems?
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3 Comments
ross.lily
ross.lily1mo ago
Rewrite your model to avoid any easy proxies like that.
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ward.jamie
ward.jamie1mo ago
Ten bucks says your validation set leaks more than my roof.
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cameronp47
cameronp471mo ago
Swap out your train/test split, that's usually the culprit lol.
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