Paper ID: 2307.15398

The Initial Screening Order Problem

Jose M. Alvarez, Antonio Mastropietro, Salvatore Ruggieri

We investigate the role of the initial screening order (ISO) in candidate screening tasks, such as employee hiring and academic admissions, in which a screener is tasked with selecting $k$ candidates from a candidate pool. The ISO refers to the order in which the screener searches the candidate pool. Today, it is common for the ISO to be the product of an information access system, such as an online platform or a database query. The ISO has been largely overlooked in the literature, despite its potential impact on the optimality and fairness of the chosen $k$ candidates, especially under a human screener. We define two problem formulations describing the search behavior of the screener under the ISO: the best-$k$, where the screener selects the $k$ best candidates; and the good-$k$, where the screener selects the $k$ first good-enough candidates. To study the impact of the ISO, we introduce a human-like screener and compare it to its algorithmic counterpart, where the human-like screener is conceived to be inconsistent over time due to fatigue. In particular, our analysis shows that the ISO, under a human-like screener solving for the good-$k$ problem, hinders individual fairness despite meeting group level fairness, and hampers the optimality of the selected $k$ candidates. This is due to position bias, where a candidate's evaluation is affected by its position within the ISO. We report extensive simulated experiments exploring the parameters of the best-$k$ and good-$k$ problems for the algorithmic and human-like screeners. The simulation framework is flexible enough to account for multiple screening settings, being an alternative to running real-world candidate screening procedures. This work is motivated by a real-world candidate screening problem studied in collaboration with an European company.

Submitted: Jul 28, 2023