HitHire: The future of ethical, fair, and sustainable AI recruitment – A governance framework

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming recruitment but remains susceptible to algorithmic bias and environmental inefficiencies. This paper presents HitHire, a pilot fairness- and sustainability-aware AI hiring platform tailored to the Saudi Arabian context and aligned with Vision 2030 goals. HitHire integrates large language models (LLMs), adversarial debiasing, Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), and real-time carbon tracking to ensure transparent and equitable candidate ranking. Evaluated on 350 anonymized CVs across four job roles (web development, finance, human resources, and data science) using a 70/20/10 train/test/validation split, HitHire achieves notable improvements in fairness metrics—Statistical Parity Difference (SPD) for gender = 0.0156 and Disparate Impact (DI) for nationality = 1.2387—while maintaining strong predictive performance (F1 = 0.96 compared to a baseline of 0.80). The system achieves over a 40% reduction in operational CO 2 emissions, with inference energy consumption of 0.003 kWh per query. In a three-month pilot study involving 23 HR professionals within a large Saudi organization, 87% of participants rated system trust at 4 out of 5 or higher. These findings contribute to national digital ethics strategies such as the Saudi Green Initiative, which emphasizes carbon neutrality and sustainable innovation.