Have you ever applied for a job only to get an auto-rejection letter within minutes or in the middle of the night? If you have, it probably gave you a sneaking suspicion that a human never actually reviewed your profile. Of course, this leads to frustration. But most job seekers aren’t going to demand to know if the hiring manager was reviewing applicants at 2 a.m. They’ll simply move on to the next “job opportunity.”

This turns into a cycle that repeats endlessly for many job seekers. Stanford knows why. Recently, the university released its findings from an extensive study looking at job applicants and AI hiring tools. The results were both astonishing and infuriating to those still looking for gainful employment.

The Stanford study wasn’t small. The university reports, “We follow 3.4 million people who submit 4 million job applications to 1,700 job postings across 150 employers and 11 industry sectors. Each job application was assessed by an AI hiring tool built by a single third-party vendor.”

Stanford found a concerning trend of racial bias when AI hiring tools were used. This bias wasn’t based on how the researchers felt; they utilized the formula provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC’s rule provides a clear approach to determine bias in hiring. Using the EEOC’s bias formula as a guide, Stanford found “that 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants applied to positions where the AI system discriminated against their racial group.”

Racial bias is creating a gap

Those percentages may sound small, but they represent a large number. “To put this in perspective: If the AI had recommended Black and Asian candidates at the same rate as it recommended the most-favored group (typically white applicants), 40,000 more of their applications would have advanced to the next stage of hiring,” Stanford University........

© Upworthy