I screened a week of applications with AI. It was fairer than me, which is the uncomfortable part
I expected bias amplification. I got something stranger: the model was more consistent than my own tired brain at 5pm, and that says something about human screening.
I'm on the hiring side this quarter — a mid-level role, about sixty applications over a week. Normally I screen in two sittings, coffee-fueled, and I'll admit what every screener won't: the last batch gets less attention than the first. This time I ran it with an AI assistant doing first-pass summaries while I made the calls. What I learned was not what I expected.
The consistency was the surprise. My human screening has moods — the resume read at 9am looks better than the identical one at 5pm, and the one right after a great candidate raises the bar unfairly for the next five. The model judged the same resume the same way every time. When I deliberately re-ran three in a different order, its summaries and scores didn't move. Mine would have.
The bias story is more complicated than the headlines. I tested it with changed names on a few resumes — swapped a couple for names suggesting different backgrounds. The summaries didn't shift. Not a scientific study, but my priors expected worse. What the model DID penalize, consistently, was unusual formatting and non-standard career paths described awkwardly. A brilliant candidate who wrote her CV like a poet scored like a mediocre one. I caught it because I read her portfolio. The machine would never have opened the portfolio.
That's the honest limit: AI screening measures how well a resume matches a job description, and that's a different thing from how well a person does a job. Everyone in hiring knows this. The uncomfortable finding of my week is that tired humans measure even less of it. The model wasn't better than me at my best. It was better than me at my worst, and my worst is a real part of the process.
So the workflow I kept: AI does first-pass structure extraction and consistency checking, I read everything anyway but now with a level playing field, and anyone with an unusual path gets their portfolio opened by definition. The tech didn't replace judgment. It removed my exhaustion from the judgment that was left.