The Strange Behavior of LLMs in Hiring Decisions: Systemic Gender and Positional Biases in Candidate Selection

May 20, 2025 · David Rozado

URL: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/the-strange-behavior-of-llms-in-hiring

“Despite identical professional qualifications across genders, all LLMs consistently favored female-named candidates when selecting the most qualified candidate for the job.”

Twenty-two LLMs picked female-named candidates 57% of the time when the resumes were identical. They picked whoever was listed first 64% of the time. Bigger and reasoning models were no better. Vendors sell this as bias-free screening.