Gender Bias in Generative AI-assisted Recruitment Processes

The growing prominence of large language models (LLMs) in daily life has heightened concerns that LLMs exhibit many of the same gender-related biases as their creators. In the context of hiring decisions, we quantify the degree to which LLMs perpetuate societal biases and investigate prompt engineering as a bias mitigation technique. Our findings suggest that for a given resumé, an LLM is more likely to hire a female candidate and perceive them as more qualified, but still recommends lower pay relative to male candidates.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into AI-assisted hiring pipelines, including automated resume generation and screening. Under the EU AI Act, the hiring domain is classified as high-risk, making fairness and transparency critical requirements. Existing work has primarily focused on explicit hiring decisions, while less attention has been paid to whether generated resumes themselves encode recoverable demographic information. In this work, we conduct a two-stage audit of demographic leakage in German-language LLM-generated resumes. First, we use ChatGPT (GPT-4o-mini), Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, and multiple scales of the open-weight Qwen 3 model family (4B, 8B, and 14B) to generate resumes from real anonymized job-matching profiles, systematically varying gender- and ethnicity-associated names while holding qualifications constant. Second, we simulate a downstream resume screening scenario, where the generated resumes are first anonymized and gender-neutralized, before demographic leakage classifiers are trained on the resulting texts. We find that, despite these interventions, classifiers reliably distinguish between resumes generated with male and female names. This leakage is not driven by overtly gendered wording, but by subtle differences in the usage of semantically equivalent, formally gender-neutral terms in German. In contrast, ethnicity-related leakage remains comparatively weak across models. Our findings demonstrate that apparently neutral resume generation can still preserve highly predictive demographic signals, raising concerns about anonymization-based fairness interventions in multilingual AI hiring pipelines.