Challenge Question
How can LA's job postings and descriptions be changed to remove unconscious biases and provide equitable access for job seekers?
Project Source: Kaggle, via Lassonde
Project Summary
The City of Los Angeles is currently facing a major hiring challenge: one-third of its 50,000 workers are eligible to retire by July of 2020. The city has partnered with Kaggle to improve the job bulletins that will fill those open positions. The content, tone, and format of job bulletins can influence the quality of the applicant pool, and overly specific job requirements often discourage diversity. The goal of this challenge is to reimagine the city’s job bulletins by using text analysis to identify needed improvements, remove unconscious biases, and provide equitable access for job seekers. The research team will convert a folder full of plain-text job postings into a single structured CSV file, then to use this data to: identify language that can negatively bias the pool of applicants, improve the diversity and quality of the applicant pool, and make it easier to determine which promotions are available to employees in each job class. Students might have backgrounds in data science, technology-based fields, human resources, the social sciences, and communications, and may be interested in issues relating to discrimination, equality, and accessibility. This challenge originated from the Kaggle website, and team members will be working with a York University mentor rather than a mentor from the organization.
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Organizational Profile
Kaggle is an online data science and machine learning community that also serves as a repository of code and data. Users can find and publish high-quality data sets, write code and build models, ask questions and collaborate, and take data science and machine learning courses through the website. Kaggle also runs competitions, where users have the opportunity to apply their knowledge to real-world machine learning problems and solve a number of complex global challenges.
Project Source Website
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Additional Resources
Key Words
- Employment Opportunity
- Text Analysis Software
- Data Science
- Diversity
- Los Angeles