hr software developers

Abstract: AI-assisted job-search tools have become increasingly popular by making it easier to find and apply to jobs. But by making it easier for applicants to generate and tailor application materials, they can also reduce how informative those materials are about applicant fit. We study this tradeoff in a hiring market where applicants differ in experience and latent match quality and firms use noisy application materials to decide whom to screen. We ask how AI affects downstream screening and hiring, and which applicants are most adversely affected. As application materials become less informative, a Bayesian firm rationally relies more heavily on coarse observables such as prior experience. Among the four applicant types defined by experience and compatibility for the job, inexperienced-compatible applicants are the most exposed: they lack observable experience and lose the individualized information that could distinguish them from other inexperienced candidates. When screening is costly, these changes can also generate inefficient screening failures in which firms screen no applicants or screen only experienced applicants. We then show that multistage hiring can arise as an endogenous firm response: a relatively inexpensive intermediate assessment allows firms to acquire new evidence of fit before costly full screening. This can restore screening opportunities that disappear under one-stage hiring and give inexperienced-compatible applicants a path to screening. Our results show how AI can shift the central friction in hiring from submitting applications to obtaining credible evaluation, creating entry barriers for high-fit workers without prior experience. Multistage hiring can endogenously arise in response, restoring evaluation opportunities that would otherwise disappear and helping preserve market functioning.

Abstract: Open-weight large language models are rapidly entering hiring pipelines, yet their discriminatory failure modes -- and the regulatory exposure these create under the EU AI Act high-risk classification (Annex III) and U.S. EEOC adverse-impact analysis -- remain poorly understood. We present the first systematic, multi-model audit of open-weight LLMs that treats job-posting language as the primary experimental variable, evaluating six models (Llama 3.2, Mistral, Gemma 3, Qwen 3, Phi 3, DeepSeek-R1) across four controlled experiments that jointly probe recruiter-simulation and job-seeker-simulation tasks. We find that (1) agentic posting language depresses recruiter recommendation scores for female candidates (r_rb = 0.309, p_Bonf = 7x10^-5; model-fixed-effects r_rb = 0.448), while communal language partially reverses the penalty; and (2) coded-exclusion language suppresses non-White recruiter scores at large effect sizes (r_rb = 0.646-0.758) and, on the job-seeker side, selectively deters non-White personas from expressing interest -- operationalizing a chilling-effect mechanism at scale. A label-ablation experiment isolates the explicit demographic persona label as the primary causal driver, and Word Embedding Association Tests corroborate these findings at the representational level (d = 1.01-1.45 under Caliskan et al.'s multi-word gender attribute lists). We translate these results into a concrete pre-deployment audit protocol -- posting-vocabulary scoring, persona-conditioned LLM probing, and adverse-impact flagging against the four-fifths threshold -- that operationalizes the documentation and risk-management obligations Annex III imposes on high-risk AI in recruitment.