News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Show HN: Fight bias with Details Redacted

After having a conversation with a friend about unconscious bias in hiring decisions, I thought it would be interesting to see if there might be any interest in a service that removes names and gender pronouns from application materials.

Is this something you'd be interested in? Are there any features I could add to make it more appealing?

Check out the live site at:

http://www.detailsredacted.com

( 4 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Fight bias with Details Redacted by Spien on Thursday October 18, 2012 @05:09PM (#4671129)
Interesting idea. Are email addresses redacted? Is the redacted data configurable?

I like being able to round file resumes from [email protected] and domains like hotmail, msn, or aol.

Re:Show HN: Fight bias with Details Redacted by simantel on Thursday October 18, 2012 @07:47PM (#4671632)
Right now everything is being done by hand, so it's totally configurable. But I imagined email addresses would be redacted, yes.

It brings up an interesting point, though - perhaps something that ranked the various components of a resume would be more useful. Rather than simply redacting the email, for instance, I could assign it a value based on the respectability of the domain and the applicant's choice of username.

School could similarly be ranked by some objective score (which might provide the added anti-bias measure of anonymizing presumed nationality). Work could be reduced to number of years in a given industry, at least for the purpose of a once-over of your candidates.

Re:Show HN: Fight bias with Details Redacted by simantel on Thursday October 18, 2012 @03:22PM (#4670548)
Re:Show HN: Fight bias with Details Redacted by snoldak924 on Thursday October 18, 2012 @03:42PM (#4670668)
Maybe turn it into a SaaS API? Sort of like a XSS-filter but just for pronouns.