{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/who-does-the-giant-number-pile-like-best","title":"Who Does the Giant Number Pile Like Best: Analyzing Fairness in Hiring Contexts","arxiv_id":"2501.04316","date":"2025-01-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Preethi Seshadri","Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes applications like hiring, yet their potential for unfair decision-making and outcomes remains understudied, particularly in generative settings. In this work, we examine the fairness of LLM-based hiring systems through two real-world tasks: resume summarization and retrieval. By constructing a synthetic resume dataset and curating job postings, we investigate whether model behavior differs across demographic groups and is sensitive to demographic perturbations. Our findings reveal that race-based differences appear in approximately 10% of generated summaries, while gender-based differences occur in only 1%. In the retrieval setting, all evaluated models display non-uniform selection patterns across demographic groups and exhibit high sensitivity to both gender and race-based perturbations. Surprisingly, retrieval models demonstrate comparable sensitivity to non-demographic changes, suggesting that fairness issues may stem, in part, from general brittleness issues. Overall, our results indicate that LLM-based hiring systems, especially at the retrieval stage, can exhibit notable biases that lead to discriminatory outcomes in real-world contexts.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04316v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04316v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"who-does-the-giant-number-pile-like-best","repo_url":"https://github.com/preethisesh/hiring_fairness","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"sensitivity","task_name":"Sensitivity"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.04316","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}