Our hiring algorithm in Austin flagged a perfect candidate as 'high risk' because of their zip code

3 comments

3 Comments

My cousin in East Austin had that happen with a job at a tech startup last year. It is really discouraging to see a system write off a whole neighborhood as a risk. These tools just seem to lock people out of chances they deserve. There has to be a better way to use tech without these old, unfair shortcuts.

max22315d ago

Reminds me of the time my own resume got filtered out for having too many short term gigs. Guess the algorithm figured I was a flight risk before I even got to explain the layoffs. So much for tech fixing human bias when we just bake our old problems into new code. Maybe we should just admit that some things still need a person to look at them.

nguyen.angela15d ago

Yeah, that's a huge flaw in these systems, @max223. They just copy old hiring biases and call it smart tech. Like, an algorithm might filter out someone who took time off for family care, or it might miss a self-taught coder because they don't have a fancy degree. It's not fixing bias, it's just hiding it behind code. We really do need a human to spot the real story behind the dates and keywords.