susan_adams•2mo agoProlific Poster

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

4 comments

4 Comments

faith_hart202mo ago

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

irisowens4d agoTop Commenter

Flip it around and think about what the algorithm is actually measuring. Its not testing for fairness at all. Its testing for consistency with past decisions. So if your old hiring process was already broken, the machine just learns to be broken faster. I saw a study where an algorithm trained on a decade of hires actually got worse over time because it kept reinforcing the same narrow patterns. The real fix isnt a better algorithm. Its fixing the human system first.

the_susan2mo 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.

wyatt1352mo ago

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.