Your hiring algorithm might be racist - Technical.ly Philly

If you're wondering why a company's staff lacks diversity, you might want to take a look at the computers behind their hiring process. Corporations are using technology in the hiring process in order to remedy historical and routine applicant discrimination, but the same technology can end up simply reinforcing this discrimination, said postdoctoral research associate Solon Barocas during "The Intersection of Data and Poverty," a Philly Tech Week 2016 presented by Comcast symposium organized by Community Legal Services and Philadelphia Legal Assistance and held at Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads in Center City. Barocas spoke on a panel about "How Big and Open Data Harms the Poor," which was focused on the unintended consequences of data technology on vulnerable populations. Companies that use machine learning and big data in their hiring process use "training data," which is typically taken from prior and current employees. A statistical process then automatically discovers the traits that correlate to high performance among the training data and looks for those traits in the applicant pools. "For more and more companies, the hiring boss is an algorithm," a 2012 Wall Street Journal article reads.