Researcher Scrapes 1M Words of Interview Transcripts with LLMs to Expose Class Filters in Hiring

soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-28

Building on annastansbury's research showing class gaps in US academia stem largely from "cultural capital" — norms of speech, dress and behavior that exclude non-elite backgrounds — the author applies the same lens to multinational hiring.

He scraped 1 million words of transcripts from YouTube mock-interview videos used to prep for India's campus placements, using LLMs to convert audio to text and extract themes at scale. His hiring pipeline has two subjective rounds: group discussions and HR "fit" interviews.

Early findings: group discussions tend to focus on policy topics (economic policy, social issues), while HR fit interviews probe cultural norms — echoing the cultural-capital exclusion mechanism.

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