Rant: The hiring algorithm at a Denver tech meetup I went to last week is a joke

I went to this networking event near downtown Denver where they demoed their new AI screening tool for job applicants. It rejected a candidate with 10 years of experience because their resume had a gap for parental leave. The devs just shrugged and said the algorithm 'learned' to penalize breaks. How is that fair when it clearly discriminates against parents? Has anyone else seen hiring AI screw over qualified people like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

sean85418h ago

That line about the algorithm "learning to penalize breaks" is wild, so did they say if they're even going to retrain it or just let it keep flagging parents?

hannah32018h ago

Heard on a tech podcast that they're probably not retraining it from scratch because that would take months. They might just tweak the data set to add more examples of legitimate breaks, like parents dealing with sick kids. Still feels like a bandaid fix though, especially if the algorithm is already in production messing up people's accounts.

foster.jordan16h ago

Whoa, actually most retraining tweaks only take days not months with modern pipelines.