It would be a foolish United States business that tried to sell chlorine-washed chicken in Europe — a region where very different food standards apply.
But in the high-tech world of algorithmically assisted hiring, it a different story.A number of startups are selling data-driven tech tools designed to comply with United States equality laws into the European Union, where their specific flavor of anti-discrimination compliance may be as legally meaningless as the marketing glitter they&re sprinkling — with eye-catching (but unquantifiable) claims of &fairness metrics& and &bias beating& AIs.First up, if your business is trying to crystal-ball-gaze something as difficult to quantify (let alone predict) as &job fit& and workplace performance, where each individual hire will almost certainly be folded into (and have their performance shaped by) a dynamic mix of other individuals commonly referred to as &a team& — and you&re going about this job matchmaking &astrology& by working off of data sets that are absolutely not representative of our colorful, complex, messy human reality — then the most pressing question is probably, &what are you actually selling?Snake oil in software form? Automation of something math won''t ever be able to &fix?& An impossibly reductionist dream of friction-free recruitment?Deep down in the small print, does your USP sum to claiming to do the least possible damage? And doesn''t that sound, well, kind of awkward?