susan_adams•8d ago

Showerthought: We spent 3 months testing a 'fair' hiring algorithm against basic resume screening. The old way was way more fair.

3 comments

3 Comments

faith_hart208d ago

Exactly! @the_susan nailed it. People see stories, not gaps.

the_susan8d ago

Wow, this is a huge wake-up call. I used to believe algorithms would remove human bias from hiring. But I saw one reject a great candidate because her resume had a gap for caregiving. A human would have asked about it. The machine just saw a hole and moved on. Sometimes the old messy way actually sees the person.

wyatt1358d agoMost Upvoted

Ugh, that's the whole problem in a nutshell. The algorithm is just checking boxes for what a "good" resume looks like, which is based on old, biased hiring data. So it learns to punish anyone who doesn't fit that narrow mold, like caregivers or career changers. A person might actually be curious about a gap and see it as a sign of resilience. The machine just sees broken data and throws the whole file away. We're not making things fair, we're just automating the same old bad habits but faster.