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Comment by notepad0x90 | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit disappointed because they didn't measure things like last name bias. By far, the biggest factor affecting resume priority is last name. There are many law suits where a candidate applies to companies twice, once with a generic European-origin name, the other with their own non-european-sounding name and the result is just very sad.

I would be curious to know if AI is actually better at this. You can train or ask humans to not have this bias, but you can with some certainty train an AI model to account for this bias and have it so that it is more fair than humans could ever be.

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> last name bias

I've experienced something close to this multiple times. I'm a mid-career white dude with a name of European origin - but my first name is a predominately female name in the modern era. I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten calls from recruiters or HR departments and heard the disappointment in their voice when I respond that I'm who they're looking for.

I've also experienced more direct discrimination, in the form of an interview process for an Director of Engineering position a couple of years ago where a verbal offer was withdrawn over a long weekend. All I got was a parting message from the recruiter saying that they had "found a woman of color" and they'd let me know. I never heard from them again.

That's also a thing. I've heard a decision maker say something in the line of "just get me a black woman" and then underlings proceed to interview strictly black women. That is not DEI or equality. That is unjust and cruel people interpreting things that way because that's the world and language they know.

> you can with some certainty train an AI model to account for this bias and have it so that it is more fair than humans could ever be.

Not really, because AI is trained on the past decisions made by humans. It's best to strip the name from the resume.

Even stripping the name is easier to enforce with LLMs than with humans, because at some point the humans need to contact the candidate, and having one person review the resume without seeing the name and another handle the candidate is impractical because HR people gossip and collude.

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