My team's AI hiring tool kept rejecting candidates over 40. I only caught it after checking 3 months of data.

I was reviewing our applicant pool for a property management role in Portland last month and saw zero matches over 45. Ran a quick age analysis on 600 rejected resumes and the algorithm was weighting graduation dates way too heavily. Has anyone else found your HR bot quietly discriminating?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_drew1mo ago

weights graduation dates way too heavily" - that's not really a weight problem, it's the algorithm doing exactly what you told it to.

claire_davis311mo ago

WAIT really? "weights graduation dates way too heavily" - that's actually something you can CONTROL in the settings, right? @the_drew I totally messed this up myself at first. There's literally a slider for date relevance in most of these tools and I always forget to tweak it. Like if you're looking at entry level roles from a few years ago, dialing that weight way DOWN changes EVERYTHING. But yeah, the algorithm is just following your lead on that one.

smith.nancy1mo ago

The slider for graduation dates is definitely a thing but I've also seen tools where the age bias creeps in through job history gaps too. Like if someone had a career break in the 90s the algorithm might flag them as "risky" even if it's just a normal gap. Tbh I had to go into our system and manually add a rule to ignore any break over 10 years old. And also check if your tool is pulling in dates from LinkedIn profiles automatically because that can override the slider settings sometimes.