Sifting job applications before an interview · Contested (since 2018)

On 10 October 2018, Reuters reported that Amazon had abandoned an experimental recruiting engine built from 2014, because it had taught itself from ten years of mostly male applications to downgrade résumés containing the word women's and graduates of two women's colleges.

Ranking a stack of applications against a job description is now done by software at almost every large employer, and the volume makes any return to hand sorting unlikely. It is contested rather than ceded because the tools keep failing in ways their users cannot see. Amazon's team could not stop its system from finding new proxies for sex, and New York City answered by requiring, from 5 July 2023, that any automated employment decision tool used in the city pass an annual independent bias audit whose results are published, with notice to the candidate. What is not ceded is the interview, the reference call, the decision to hire, and the obligation to explain a refusal, which no employer has been allowed to delegate to a score.