Recruit Group HR Technology SBU Indeed's Principles on Algorithms and Fairness

A commitment to fairness is core to Indeed's mission.
Indeed's mission is to help people get jobs. As the world's #1 jobs site, it's our mission to help all people get jobs -- including people traditionally disadvantaged in the labor market. Technology can help people overcome barriers they face, including unfair bias in the hiring process. Without care, technology can also introduce new problems.

The fairness roadmap is unclear, and Indeed can help lead.
There are no established best practices for assuring fairness in algorithms and models. There are multiple ways to define fairness in the job decision process itself. And it's hard to predict what future laws and regulations will require or allow. Finally, the tools of data science and machine learning are evolving, and new, powerful methods may lack the transparency of older approaches.

These uncertainties and ambiguities provide an opportunity for Indeed to listen, to learn, and then to lead.

This is an ongoing, long-term effort.　This is a company-wide commitment. No one team -- or one set of skills -- can do the job alone. Our initial working group includes researchers, data scientists, and lawyers, with support from senior leadership and enthusiasm from teams across the company.

We do not expect these efforts to come to an end. There is no finish line. As we learn, products and technical tools will evolve, as will public awareness and our clients' and users' interest in new products.

We will approach fairness with rigor and care. Technology presents the ability to assess and test for unfair bias more easily than human decisions.We will approach these issues with rigor, collecting data as necessary and exploring ways to assess our processes. We want quantitative measurements wherever possible, while not overlooking ethical concerns such as transparency that are harder to quantify. And we are eager to learn how academic researchers, civil-society organizations, and other companies are working to address these issues.