Serious question, did the hiring tool really reject me for my zip code?
I used to roll my eyes at people who blamed the hiring software when they got turned down, figured they were just looking for an excuse. Then a friend showed me the audit report from a temp agency in Cleveland that ran their own applicant screener, and the model was dropping people from two zip codes at nearly double the rate even when their resumes scored the same. That got me looking at a paper from a Chicago research group that found the same pattern in 3 out of 5 tools they tested, all because the training data came from past hires. I was wrong to shrug it off, since the bias is baked in before any human ever sees a resume. How do you even check for this if you are just one person applying?