Global AI leader welcomes federal civil rights support

Written by PR Newswire

MELBOURNE, Australia, Nov. 3, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global leaders in ethical AI in hiring, PredictiveHire has applauded the initiative of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure that AI complies with federal civil rights law when used in hiring.

PredictiveHire CEO Barb Hyman has long been advocating for a body to oversee the AI industry in recruitment to make sure that bias is eliminated by those who claim that's what their technology is achieving.

"This is a really important step in holding the AI industry up to higher standards," Hyman said. "We've been unregulated for too long and there needs to be some oversight to claims that some companies are making about their technology and bias.

"At the same time the announcement recognises that AI makes eliminating bias possible and that it can be used for good to create fairer hiring processes."

Earlier this year, PredictiveHire received global recognition for its work in bias elimination at the AI-industry's highest awards ceremony - CogX. They also released the FAIR framework ^[1] - a global standard for the responsible use of AI in recruitment.

Hyman said PredictiveHire set out to eliminate bias in hiring as a priority and that it has always been transparent with the market and customers on its science, bias regime and results.

"Our rule based candidate recommendation models are built on a combination of machine learning and optimization algorithms striking a fine balance between fairness, validity and expert defined "ideal candidate profile," Hyman said.

"This is in stark contrast to the mainstream approach in many candidate screening systems that employ machine learning-only models using past hiring and performance data, with bias testing as an afterthought.

"In our approach, being unbiased is a constraint that the model has to satisfy while finding the optimum model aligned to expert judgement and/or past hiring/performance outcomes. "In other words, the algorithm is "fairness aware" in its exploration to find the most predictive model."

She said the power of the technology had been proven time and time again through the results their customers were getting.

Qantas, just one of the global brands using PredictiveHire, found that they have effectively mitigated bias that usually comes into initial job screening according to Michael Eizenberg, Head of Qantas Group Talent, Digital & Analytics.

"One of the reasons we went with PredictiveHire was the fact that they were so candidate centric, as well as the transparency around their AI, which too often happens in a black box," Eizenberg said.

"They hold themselves accountable to the claims they make around bias mitigation."

Hyman said she welcomed any opportunity to work with the EEOC when it came to understanding bias elimination in AI, something she feels very strongly is an important issue for our time."Great things can be achieved in eliminating bias with the right technology and it's wonderful to see this recognised by the US EEOC," she said.

For media enquiries:

Barb Hyman CEO Barb@predictivehire.com +61 468 915 348^[2]

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