A curriculum vitae donation campaign kicks off to develop fair and non-discriminatory candidate selection systems. This initiative is part of the European project FINDHR (Fairness and Intersectional Non-Discrimination in Human Recommendation) in which the University of Pisa is a partner. FINDHR aims to combat discrimination, particularly in systems that rank job applicants. Italian and English anonymised CVs can be donated via the project’s website and will be used to develop a system that generates CVs.
"In this way we disengage ourselves from the donated CVs so that we can generate as many as we like, changing only a few sensitive elements, such as gender, so as to verify the impact of that factor while keeping everything else intact," explains Professor Salvatore Ruggieri, FINDHR contact person for the University of Pisa.
The use of automatic candidate selection systems based on Artificial Intelligence is widespread, especially by recruiting companies that have to monitor and assess large numbers of applications. It is well known that these systems can reproduce discriminatory decisions in the training data of models, to the disadvantage of people and social groups, such as women, migrants and ethnic minorities. Furthermore, these systems can introduce new forms of algorithmic discrimination, e.g., favouring candidates because of the submitted CV format, such as a pdf or text files.
From a multidisciplinary point of view, including technological, legal and ethical aspects, FINDHR will therefore facilitate prevention, detection and management of discrimination in candidate selection systems.
In addition to the University of Pisa, FINDHR's partners are IT specialists (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, coordinator, Universiteit Van Amsterdam, Max Planck Institute), ethical-legal specialists (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Radboud Universiteit), Human Resources companies (Adevinta, Randstad), and labour rights organisations (AlgorithmWatch, Eticas, European Trade Union Confederation, Praksis, WIDE+).