A Taxonomy-Driven Synthetic Dataset for Retrieval Effectiveness and Fairness Evaluation in Hiring

arXiv:2611.09178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While machine learning hiring tools are ubiquitous, the need for privacy regulations and commercial sensitivity makes public benchmarking legally complex. We address this challenge by introducing a taxonomy-driven, fully synthetic HR dataset and benchmark to simultaneously evaluate retrieval effectiveness and algorithmic fairness. Grounded in 660K real freelancer profiles, our multilingual corpus features candidate profiles, project briefs, and counterfactual demographic twins. Auditing state-of-the-art embedding models reveals performance divergence from general MTEB scores, alongside fairness disparities in grammatically gendered languages. This demonstrates that general benchmarks are insufficient for HR, requiring tailored evaluations to identify Pareto-optimal models that balance semantic accuracy and fairness.