Are hiring algorithms fair? They're too opaque to tell, study finds

Time is money and, unfortunately for companies, hiring new employees takes significant time – more than a month on average, research shows. Hiring decisions are also rife with human bias, leading some organizations to hand off at least part of their employee searches to outside tech companies who screen applicants with machine learning algorithms. If humans have such a hard time finding the best fit for their companies, the thinking goes, maybe a machine can do it better and more efficiently. But new research from a team of Computing and Information Science scholars raises questions about those algorithms and the tech companies who develop and use them: How unbiased is the automated screening process? How are the algorithms built?