Abstract
Human Resource (HR) analytics software is increasingly used by companies to gain more insights into their data and to enhance their decision-making processes. Many companies rely on external software provided by software suppliers to support processes, such as screening of job applications or assessing employee’s performance. Using this software can impose multiple ethical risks. As there is only limited research about how fairness is constructed by software suppliers in practice, the aim of this research is to investigate the construction of fairness by suppliers and to understand which phases of the employment life cycle are impacted by fairness. To do so, we analysed 21 websites of software suppliers. We identified seven different concepts of fairness. Furthermore, we were able to identify the phases that are most and least impacted by fairness in practice. Thus, our findings reveal that fairness is rather understood as a “thing” than a process or a particular outcome of a decision. This is important to understand, as it makes a difference in how fairness is theoretically constructed and how it is actually constructed in practice, which provides us a more differentiated understanding of fairness in the employment life cycle.
Recommended Citation
Knippschild, Stefanie; Boell, Sebastian; Peter, Sandra; and Riemer, Kai, "Fairness for Hire: An Investigation of how Software Suppliers Construct Fairness in the Employment Life Cycle" (2023). ACIS 2023 Proceedings. 114.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2023/114