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0 pointscom2kid1y ago0 comments

Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.

Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender, name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the first filtering round of an interview is also completely anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI tools could even be used to remove accents.

HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.

It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next candidate."

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chrislongss1y ago

Reminds of the infamous attempt to fight discrimination in orchestras by conducting blind auditions. Which ended up reducing diversity even further.

naijaboiler1y ago

This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.

Apparently, people like to discriminate. Where there are overt markers, there is still a chance that people fear the legality of their discrimination. And when you remove overt markers of discrimination, people look for subtle markers, and those exist, and then still end up discriminating.

End result, even fewer qualified members of the discriminated class gets hired.

zo11y ago

Of course the "answer" is never that people were biased in favor of DEI groups in the first place, and removing said overt markers of their race just removed that bias because individuals could no longer discriminate. No, the answer was obviously then is that people found "secret" and "subtle" markers instead because they just have to discriminate and don't like DEI groups.

Occams razor comes to mind.

DangitBobby1y ago

Has it been proven that people still manage to tell races of candidates apart after removing markers? Or is this all just conjecture?

com2kidOP1y ago

Do you have links to any studies that removing names and other obvious markers from resumes (college name, employment dates, etc) somehow increases discrimination in HR screening?

I honestly fail to how that could happen.

For example, if HR is throwing away all resumes that aren't from an Ivy League, then removing cities and schools from the resume can only help.

Manuel_D1y ago

If "subtle markers" can still identify someone's race or gender, then remove those markers too. You can test of this works by giving employees bonuses to correctly guess the candidates' demographics and see if they can predict reliably.

If anonymization reduced the representation of certain demographics maybe it doesn't make discrimination worse, but rather you were wrong about which groups are discriminated against?

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