Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
It’s a well known complaint that more and more hiring at companies of all shapes and sizes are utilizing automated systems to scan candidates who apply for open jobs. On the one hand, this is understandable as the number of applicants to jobs is skyrocketing- just look at LinkedIn Jobs postings that are more than a week old, and you’ll regularly see 500+ applicants in densely populated places.
That’s legitimately a hard number of resumes to go through, so these systems (called Automated Employment Decision Tools, or AEDTs), help with the first line of cuts. Cynically this is also where the saying “it’s not what you know it’s who you know” comes into play. Best to just skip the first line, if you can.
Anyway, increasingly AEDTs are using AI or AI-like decision making, and NYC was concerned that it was going to cause race and gender bias as can very easily happen. The law, called LL144, was passed in 2021, and went into effect in July 2023. Early reports show that, well, it’s just not a good one.
Companies are required to post audit reports online to show a) that they are using these tools, and b) that these tools are not biased. Out of 391 companies sampled, only 18 had published anything at all. The reason for this was simple: There’s no meaningful penalties, nor are there hard and fast benchmarks defined to say what is and what isn’t discrimination.
Hopefully this can go into the annals of history as a “good first try,” and a new law is enacted that fixes these policy issues.