an AI resume screener had been trained on CVs of employees already at the firm, giving people extra marks if they listed “baseball” or “basketball” – hobbies that were linked to more successful staff, often men. Those who mentioned “softball” – typically women – were downgraded.
Marginalised groups often “fall through the cracks, because they have different hobbies, they went to different schools”
Actually, at least based on my area, McDonald’s seems to be careful about hiring, or at least careful about not letting bad service creep in.
The food and overall experience is… fine, and you go there because you want food and you want it with little to no hassle and get the food reasonably quickly and expect them to get the order right. If the service is bad, then I’m going pretty much anywhere else, McDonald’s is not worth putting up with crap service. A poor hiring practice coming around would tank the only reason to go there.
There are a number of other fast food places in the area I would tend to prefer, but avoid because their service just sucks, the order taker somehow not knowing the item you are ordering is on the menu, taking an eternity to make orders, and getting the orders wrong in the end, and then things like the fried food clearly being cooked in oil that needed to be changed a few batches ago. I’ve seen what poor hiring practices can do to a ‘good’ restaurant, I can only imagine what it would do if McDonald’s had that problem.
The strategy of McDs has been to saturate the market. You’ll find more of their franchises per capita in your neighborhood than any other food retailer.
Starbucks employs a similar strategy.
I’ve lived in a few spots where people would talk about the “bad McDs” versus the “good McDs”. And the split would inevitably be economic, with the richer neighborhood that could pay the better wages commanding a staff that was more professional.
But the franchise overall never suffered. They made money hand over fist at both locations.