HACKER Q&A
📣 anyfactor

Evaluate my weekend idea project, “non-prejudicial audio interview”


Time for my biweekly weekend project to get my startup juices flowing. The idea is simple (and somewhat naïve).

There was this senate confirmation hearing where the interviewee (a Democrat nominee) said, "We all harbor inherent racial biases." So I thought what would be the most "The Voice"esque way to hire people where you put aside every discriminatory prejudice you have and do at least the audio screening interview based on merit alone. And here are.

The plan is to -

- Use TTS to transcribe audio to text

- Remove high frequency common phrasing that can be associated with a particular group

- Read back the text with a computer voice.

Seems like a super naïve idea that is novel and unsellable. For screening interviews over phone call or audio chat atleast this idea kinda feels appropriate. But food for thought right :)

PS: let me know if these kind of posts are bad for HN. I have read the FAQs and Guideline page multiple times for this. I think it falls fairly into the category of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

  👤 humblefactory Accepted Answer ✓
I agree with your assessment that this idea is naïve. The sort of biases that you referred to are subtly and pervasively distributed through all of the different schematic and ideological methods that we use for choosing language. This means that your filter list would be untennably large and difficult to construct because of how broad it would be. Moreover, these sorts of biases often are based on less than liminal evaluation metrics. It's not just that hiring companies look at POC candidates and say "nope" based on a name or photo. Instead, they are drawing from pools of candidates like high-end computer science programs, which often have already done the work of exclusion all ready, because of costs or admission requirements. Or they are basing their hiring decisions on having prior experience in internships, which often don't pay enough for the high cost cities in which they are located to support folks without additional means (from parents or relatives) to manage living expenses.

Long story short, if you really want to address this problem (or implicit bias in hiring) there is actually a huge literature coming out of business schools, public administration schools, and our of corporate DEI initiatives. Software driven support for these efforts is a crucial part of moving them forward, and you should definitely spend some more of your weekends brainstorming on this!