Invisible Filters: Cultural Bias in Hiring Evaluations Using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Rao, Pooja S. B., Venkatesan, Laxminarayen Nagarajan, Cherubini, Mauro, Jayagopi, Dinesh Babu
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Rao, Pooja S. B.
Venkatesan, Laxminarayen Nagarajan
Cherubini, Mauro
Jayagopi, Dinesh Babu
author_facet Rao, Pooja S. B.
Venkatesan, Laxminarayen Nagarajan
Cherubini, Mauro
Jayagopi, Dinesh Babu
contents Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in hiring, with large language models (LLMs) having the potential to influence or even make hiring decisions. However, this raises pressing concerns about bias, fairness, and trust, particularly across diverse cultural contexts. Despite their growing role, few studies have systematically examined the potential biases in AI-driven hiring evaluation across cultures. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis of how LLMs assess job interviews across cultural and identity dimensions. Using two datasets of interview transcripts, 100 from UK and 100 from Indian job seekers, we first examine cross-cultural differences in LLM-generated scores for hirability and related traits. Indian transcripts receive consistently lower scores than UK transcripts, even when they were anonymized, with disparities linked to linguistic features such as sentence complexity and lexical diversity. We then perform controlled identity substitutions (varying names by gender, caste, and region) within the Indian dataset to test for name-based bias. These substitutions do not yield statistically significant effects, indicating that names alone, when isolated from other contextual signals, may not influence LLM evaluations. Our findings underscore the importance of evaluating both linguistic and social dimensions in LLM-driven evaluations and highlight the need for culturally sensitive design and accountability in AI-assisted hiring.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Invisible Filters: Cultural Bias in Hiring Evaluations Using Large Language Models
Rao, Pooja S. B.
Venkatesan, Laxminarayen Nagarajan
Cherubini, Mauro
Jayagopi, Dinesh Babu
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in hiring, with large language models (LLMs) having the potential to influence or even make hiring decisions. However, this raises pressing concerns about bias, fairness, and trust, particularly across diverse cultural contexts. Despite their growing role, few studies have systematically examined the potential biases in AI-driven hiring evaluation across cultures. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis of how LLMs assess job interviews across cultural and identity dimensions. Using two datasets of interview transcripts, 100 from UK and 100 from Indian job seekers, we first examine cross-cultural differences in LLM-generated scores for hirability and related traits. Indian transcripts receive consistently lower scores than UK transcripts, even when they were anonymized, with disparities linked to linguistic features such as sentence complexity and lexical diversity. We then perform controlled identity substitutions (varying names by gender, caste, and region) within the Indian dataset to test for name-based bias. These substitutions do not yield statistically significant effects, indicating that names alone, when isolated from other contextual signals, may not influence LLM evaluations. Our findings underscore the importance of evaluating both linguistic and social dimensions in LLM-driven evaluations and highlight the need for culturally sensitive design and accountability in AI-assisted hiring.
title Invisible Filters: Cultural Bias in Hiring Evaluations Using Large Language Models
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16673