New York's Automated Hiring Bill to Impede Economic Recovery Endeavors
In the heart of the job market, New York City is taking a significant step towards ensuring fairness in the hiring process. The New York City Council has proposed a bill that aims to make it unlawful for companies to sell automated hiring tools without a recent bias audit.
This move comes as a response to the growing use of applicant tracking systems, which have been in operation since the 1990s, and are excluded from the bill's regulations. The bill, however, targets automated hiring tools governed by statistical theory or using inferential methodologies, linear regression, neural networks, decision trees, random forests, and other learning algorithms.
The bill is not expected to help get more people back to work quickly and fairly, but it could send a strong market signal to developers about what customers will expect of an algorithmic system. Developers risk losing market share to competitors that provide algorithms with the necessary capabilities to address biases in hiring.
A 2020 study found that even when using a ranking algorithm, employers hiring for event staffing were more likely to hire women. This underscores the need for transparency, explainability, confidence measures, and procedural regularity in developing algorithms to help address biases in automated hiring tools.
The proposed bill requires free annual bias audits for automated hiring tools. However, it's challenging to validate that automated hiring systems do not have bias with a particular employer or job listing. This highlights the need for ongoing vigilance and continuous improvement in the development and use of these tools.
The unemployment rate in New York City is almost twice the national rate, and four in ten American employers are struggling to find workers with the right skills. Automated hiring tools can be used for tasks like resume screening, reference checking, and video interviews, making them a potential solution to these challenges.
Examples of companies offering resume screening tools include Ideal, reference checking tools include Checkster, and video interview tools include HireVue. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are among the companies using video interview tools for standardized, video interviews.
Focusing anti-discrimination rules on vendors who sell automated hiring tools could encourage them to develop responsible hiring systems. On the other hand, focusing on the root of the problem, which is employers exhibiting biases in their hiring decisions, could be more impactful.
Image credits: Oto Godfrey
Policymakers in New York City should be addressing the high unemployment rates in the city, and this bill is a step in the right direction. As the use of automated hiring tools becomes more prevalent, it's crucial to ensure they are fair, transparent, and free of bias.
