Hiring Algorithms Can’t Be Fixed by Employers Alone

Some of the country’s largest employers, including General Motors, IBM and Meta, have formed a new venture with a laudable goal: ensuring that artificial intelligence doesn’t perpetuate or worsen discrimination in hiring. The mere existence of the Data & Trust Alliance, as it is called, is good news — but it needs to be a lot better.

Hiring has changed radically in the past couple of decades. Online recruiting allows many more people to apply to each opening, requiring employers to sort through more applications. Companies initially coped by simply throwing out resumes that lacked certain keywords or skills, but now they’re increasingly using more mathematically sophisticated AI. Typically, such algorithms are licensed from specialized software vendors, which advertise their products as unbiased, fair and objective.