Humans vs GPTs: Bias and validity in hiring decisions

The advent of large language models (LLMs) may reshape hiring in the labour market. This paper investigates how generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs)—i.e. OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o—can aid hiring decisions. In a direct comparison between humans and GPTs on an identical hiring task, I show that GPTs tend to select candidates more liberally than humans but exhibit less ethnic bias. GPT-4 even slightly favours certain ethnic minorities. While LLMs may complement humans in hiring by making a (relatively extensive) pre-selection of job candidates, the findings suggest that they may miss-select due to a lack of contextual understanding and may reproduce pre-trained human bias at scale.