arXiv AI By Nicol\`o Pagan, Michael Andreas Ebling, Stefania Ionescu, Anik\'o Hann\'ak

AI evaluators favor job applications written by certain AI models, independent of candidate quality

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The study examines how the choice of large language model (LLM) used to write job application cover letters influences hiring decisions, independent of the applicant’s qualifications. Using a multi‑model audit with eleven writer agents and nine evaluator agents across ten job descriptions, the authors find a consistent ranking of writer models—locally hosted models are disadvantaged and evaluators often favor their own outputs. The hierarchy has tangible effects, with up to 1.8 of 25 qualified candidates being rejected solely due to model mismatch, and the patterns are explained by shared stylistic cues that both writers and evaluators reward or penalise.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

The Audit Decides the Verdict: Instrument Effects Rival Demographic Bias in LLM Decision Audits

The study examines how the design of audit questions influences perceived bias in large language models (LLMs). Using 40,726 requests across five models and three domains—hiring, lending, and medical triage—the authors find that demographic bias effects are not replicated when the audit is standardized. Instead, the audit’s construction, such as question phrasing and ordering, has a stronger impact on model responses than applicant demographics.

By Siddharth Vohra, Manikandan Ravikiran
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Linguistic Triggers of Gender and Racial Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Applied to Recruitment

The paper reports the first systematic audit of open‑weight large language models (LLMs) in hiring contexts, examining how job‑posting language influences recruiter and job‑seeker simulations across six models. It finds that agentic language lowers recruiter scores for female candidates while communal language mitigates this effect, and that coded‑exclusion language sharply reduces recruiter scores for non‑White candidates and discourages non‑White personas from applying. The study also identifies the explicit demographic label as the main causal factor and proposes a concrete pre‑deployment audit protocol aligned with EU and U.S. regulatory requirements.

By Kosuke Kitahara, Nobuhiro Yamaguchi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Bias Audits Detect Bias but Disagree on Ranking: Evidence from Ten Instruments and Ten Frontier Models

The study evaluates ten bias audit instruments across ten advanced language models on occupational gender, age, and socioeconomic status. While each tool reliably detects bias, their rankings of model performance are essentially random, indicating that different audits measure distinct constructs. The findings show that a single audit can identify bias direction within its own framework, but no audit can consistently rank models against one another.

By William Guey, Pierrick Bougault, Wei Zhang, Vitor D. de Moura, Jos\'e O. Gomes