# How AI Could Make Hiring Bias Worse

- **Episode:** [161](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/161.md) (2025-01-09)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** ai, hiring-bias, artificial-intelligence
- **Time:** 39:52–43:51 (start 2392s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/161?t=2392](https://truthliesandwork.com/161?t=2392)

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[39:52] Nora Burns: What I fear will happen is that AI will get way too involved in our hiring protocol, and we will become less connected instead of more connected. That's my fear with where we are currently in 2023, looking into 2024. What I hope happens is that more and more organizations understand that it is an employment relationship, that treating employees as widgets, as having disregard for their time, their expertise, their brilliance, And that will cost us in the long run. I know it will. I know that not connecting to candidates effectively, not onboarding effectively, has a long-term impact on our overall P&L. It's just too long of an impact for us to see the immediate, right, in order to take as much action as really needs to be taken. It requires a strategic leader to realize that they need to invest in the very front of that employment relationship at the very beginning, at the candidate relationship and the candidate experience in order to make sure that they make 4th quarter goals. And I like working with those strategic leaders. I think in the long term it pays off, and I think we've seen it in really successful organizations who have demonstrated it. But yeah, my fear, my fear, and what I would see happening in the crystal ball of hiring is we get a little bit lazier and use a little bit more AI, and it doesn't work in connecting us to the human that's doing the job
[41:44] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, it's— I was talking to another psychologist, and they were telling me they've been— their organization been doing research, um, and actually start to find that AI is biased. It carried the same bias in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of sexuality. It's— yeah, so it's selecting candidates in and out based on previous biases
[42:05] Nora Burns: Yeah, it's, it's a garbage in, garbage out situation, right? So when we give it biased and, and inaccurate information, it's going to make decisions based on that. And we already have so much bias built into our hiring processes that to add another layer of that where it's unseen, I think, is really damaging. One of the things I recommend for hiring managers and organizations is to do heavily redacted resumes and applications. The person who's making the decision, I don't want to have name. I don't even want to have the name. Make up a name. Bob 1, Bob 2, Anna 1, Anna 2, whatever. On the first pass, on the first pass, I don't want to know where you went to college. I don't want to know. I definitely don't want to know what year you graduated college. I want anything that could bias me in my selection process to not be part of that first round of reviewing resumes and applications. Because I can tell you, having done some A/B testing as the undercover candidate, we've got some strong bias by industry of which applications move forward. That The traditionally male name, the traditionally female name, you know, the person who puts 25 years of experience versus the person who puts 5 years of experience. There's some pretty strong bias in that. And if we can remove that, we're going to have better hiring. And of course, we're going to find out when they're sitting across from us. We learn a whole lot of information about skin color and gender information and all of that. We don't need it at the start of the funnel, and it will make our hiring processes stronger in the long run