Survival of the Best Fit: Explore Algorithmic Bias in Recruitment via Interactive Game

December 16, 2022

Imagine back when you were looking for a workplace after you graduated, or back when you were probably a Junior or Senior in college, looking for internships to solidify your resume. It is certain that most of the time, you were probably not the only one that applied. You would probably compete with a significant amount of people with outstanding achievements like yours. In fact, did you know that there were probably more students in the same position as you than you thought? Goldman Sach actually reported that 236,000 people applied for internships globally at the bank, including 79,000 in the Americas (1). That's a lot of applications to go through!

With these many people applying each year, you would probably wonder how big companies are able to keep up with recruiting people. Some companies' solutions are to resort to hiring AI for scanning through applicants' resumes. However, even though it seems like a win-win situation for everyone, there are reports that AIs shockingly produced biased results toward marginalized groups. For example, it was reported that Amazon terminated their AI recruiting as “it taught itself that male candidates were preferable” and “it penalized resumes that included the word “women’s”” (2)(3).

To understand this issue a little bit better, why don't we try being a hiring manager for a day! Survival of the Best Fit is a game developed at New York University, aiming to "explain how the misuse of AI can make machines inherit human biases and further inequality" and "demand more accountability from those building increasingly pervasive software systems" (4). You can learn more about the project and become a hiring manager below!

You can also access the site here if the embed version does not work!

What have you learned from the game? Do you also think that humans should still be involved in the hiring process despite having capable AI in place? Let me know on my Instagram.

References

1. Son, H. (2022, April 5). There's no shortage of aspiring Goldman bankers as record 236,000 students apply for Internships. CNBC. Retrieved December 14, 2022, from https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/05/goldman-says-record-236000-students-apply-for-internships.html
2. Dastin, J. (2018, October 10). Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women. Reuters. Retrieved December 14, 2022, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G
3. Gonzalez, M. F., Liu, W., Shirase, L., Tomczak, D. L., Lobbe, C. E., Justenhoven, R., & Martin, N. R. (2022). Allying with ai? reactions toward human-based, AI/ML-based, and augmented hiring processes. Computers in Human Behavior, 130, 107179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107179
4. Csapo, G., Kim, J., Klasinc, M., & ElKattan, A. (2019). Survival of the best fit. Survival of the Best Fit. Retrieved December 14, 2022, from https://www.survivalofthebestfit.com/