Live data from Hacker News

AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

arxiv.org

71–80 of 190 posts

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#71
That's what people on both side have been doing for at least couple years already.

Recruiters scan resumes for the best match with LLMs, candidates use the same LLMs (there's only like 3 of them) to tweak their resume for better match. I don't know what research you need to see why that makes sense.

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#72
Even if we take this to be true, I'm not sure that it really matters?

It's comparing two resumes with the same information and picking one of the two. That's obviously a situation that would never occur in actual hiring. This doesn't demonstrate anything at all that indicates that LLMs would incorrectly preference LLM-written resumes in the real world.

It'd be interesting to do the same thing but with two resumes that are almost identical. One is slightly better (an extra year of experience or a specific note of some skill that is relevant to the role), and the other slightly worse one is written by an LLM. If the reviewing LLM picks the worse one in that case, you're potentially establishing a bias that would matter. As it stands this experiment just seems contrived and pointless.

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#73
post #62

The only test that has worked 100% of the time for me is to read the candidate's code. Two hours is enough to precisely estimate the candidate's qualities as a software developer. I never understood why companies waste time with tests and quizzes because since it is so easy for me it should be just as easy for other software developers too. Of course, a candidate may be a jerk or unfit for other reasons, but ranking…

Just like they'll send you an LLM'd resume, they will send you LLM'd code.

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#74

Anecdata, sample size of one: When I was looking for my next role after being laid off, I didn’t get much of a response with my human handmade resume despite my experience Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT to “Analyze my resume and give it a score for what percentage it was in” then I asked it to revise it to make it score as high as possible I still tweaked and fact checked it but after I started sending that out, I g…

Same thing happened to my wife as well. I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc. Nevertheless, she never received any outreach recruiters and got very few application responses. It went like that for months, almost a year.

Then she asked ChatGPT 5.x for help. I was skeptical about the changes it recommended (and was skeptical at all about using AI for this given the homogeneification it tends to produce). But somehow it worked: few days later, a recruiter reached out, then another, then applications started moving forward, etc.

My guess is that, as LLMs are shoveled into every phase of the recruiting process, not having an LLM write your resume for you is now playing on hard mode. The LLMs reviewing resumes are downranking resumes and profiles that are not "speaking" the same language and activating the correct neurons, thus preventing you from moving forward. This contrasts with years ago when we had more humans in the loop and the pasteurised writing of GPT 3.5/4o would make you look less worthy. Again, just a theory, but...

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#75

disclaimer: Not a lawyer, but studying towards CIPP/E. You'd make no friends doing it, but as I understand it, for those that have GDPR as a statutory right then under "[Article 22 - Automated individual decision-making, including profiling][0]" you can request to know if your CV was screened by AI and what (and this is key) "meaningful human interaction" led to that decision. Technically this falls under a data subj…

The issue is that indeed, nobody is going to enforce that.

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#76
post #57
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some will, others openly say on the job ad they will fail you for using AI.

I know if I got a resume from someone that had obviously used AI to generate it, it would be a pass.

What if your own HR's LLM didn't send you any other kind?

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#77
post #57
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some will, others openly say on the job ad they will fail you for using AI.

I know if I got a resume from someone that had obviously used AI to generate it, it would be a pass.

Before the resume ends up in the hiring manager's inbox it needs to be picked by the recruiter from literally hundreds of others. The recruiter uses HR software to determine the match (usually the percentage), and then picks top 5% or top 20 or whatever highest ranked resumes.

Guess what's doing the ranking.

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#78

That's what people on both side have been doing for at least couple years already. Recruiters scan resumes for the best match with LLMs, candidates use the same LLMs (there's only like 3 of them) to tweak their resume for better match. I don't know what research you need to see why that makes sense.

This indicates that resumes created by the same model may have an advantage over those created by other model, so I suppose technically you may have a small advantage if an insider tells you the resume parsing tool is powered by Gemini as opposed to the other models.

My broader discomfort is that we are still learning about model biases while human biases are arguably better understood, and I don't like the ethics of rejecting a person based on criteria I don't fully understand.

Re: AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights

#80

Does anyone know of any HR departments actually using LLMs for scoring, selection, extraction, classification or any real use cases? I'm curious to hear about it and how they are using it.

We were told by hr NY has strict state laws against this
Post reply on HN