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Comment by jkaplowitz | Hacker News Reader

It probably makes it easier for them to discriminate than without the video, but how is it directly more illegal under discrimination law than only hiring at in-person job fairs where you can see the same protected characteristics at the time of accepting a resume as can be seen in a video?

Regardless, yes, it’s bullshit and harmful to equity in hiring. I’m certainly not defending it.

Since we’re on a site run by YC, I should note that a version of the same “record a video” requirement is part of the standard YC application, with some of the same downsides for equitable venture capital investment decisions. Of course, a big difference is that venture capital investment decisions are entirely outside of the scope of discrimination law as currently enacted everywhere I know of, despite being very close in effect and power dynamics to hiring decisions in an employment context.

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AIUI, case law has generally concluded that requesting videos is unnecessary and prejudicial, and therefore forbidden, whereas in-person hiring has a much stronger case for being useful for other reasons. If a company literally only ever hired people through in-person career fairs, that would probably get examined with scrutiny as well, but that's rare. I am nothing like a lawyer, though, and could be entirely wrong.

Understandable that there are a lot of thoughts on this and glad you pointed out that YC includes a brief video as part of the application - that's actually where we got the idea!

e.g. from the YC app "Founder Video Please record a one minute video introducing the founder(s).* Make sure the file does not exceed 100 MB. Read more about the video here."

We're looking to confirm that applicants can clearly and concisely communicate by describing something challenging they've done. Our goal is to efficiently find thoughtful applicants.

We're proud of our team, with folks from a variety of backgrounds. Clarity of thought is distributed across populations. :)

It makes sense that you got the idea from YC, yes. Unfortunately YC is quite far from a good source on how to remove unconscious bias from hiring processes.

Consider clarifying that the applicant should not themselves be visible in the video, to reduce the risk of discrimination in favor of certain ethnicities or against others. To be clear, my suggested requirement is that the visuals in the video must support the content but that the video must not depict the appearance of the applicant.

In the hypothetical alternate reality where one can trust that applicants would not represent the work of someone else or of generative AI as their own, I would also encourage replacing the audio with text to speech, so as to reduce the risk of discrimination based on the perceived gender or the particular accent of the applicant. Unfortunately, I don’t think one can trust arbitrary applicants to be that honest, so the ability to recognize the voice from the video in subsequent interviews still provides some useful authentication value. I would like a better solution there but don’t have one to offer right now.

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