Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

The World Cup is in full swing, which means at least one moment per match when the entire broadcast pauses so a referee can jog over to a sideline screen and squint at a replay. That pause is courtesy of Video Assistant Referee (VAR).

For most of soccer’s history, the game ran purely on human eyes and split-second judgment - no replays. Whatever the referee saw (or didn’t see) stood. Over the last decade, that’s started to shift. VAR was introduced at the 2018 World Cup to review the bigger, match-changing moments: missed handballs, wrongly disallowed goals, mistaken identity on a red card.

A separate team of officials watches the match through multiple video feeds in a control room. If they spot what they consider a “clear and obvious error,” they alert the on-field referee, who can either accept the recommendation or go review the footage themselves before making the final call.

It’s meant to remove doubt and was pitched as the great equalizer in soccer. Except the bias didn’t disappear; it just relocated.

“Clear and obvious” is still a judgment call. One official’s obvious is another’s debatable. A handball still hinges on interpretation (intent, proximity, natural position) even in slow motion. And before any of that, there’s another filter: what even gets flagged for review in the first place.

The technology didn’t remove the human; it just moved them behind a screen. Once a decision appears to come from a system rather than a person, it becomes harder to question.

Which is where things start to feel familiar, because we’ve seen this story play out elsewhere. Hiring systems work in a surprisingly similar way.

In hiring, bias doesn’t always show up as someone actively making a discriminatory choice. More often, it shows up earlier, before a candidate is ever considered for a role; it’s embedded in what gets filtered in or out before a human ever weighs in. Resume parsers trained on past hiring data learn patterns that already reflect inequality. “Culture fit,” “strong communicator” - all of it can feel neutral right up until you ask who defined the standard in the first place.

If women’s profiles aren’t reaching the top of the stack, if certain resumes are quietly ranked lower, if entire pools of talent are never surfaced to decision-makers, then the “review” stage is already operating on a narrowed view of reality.

So whether it’s a match-winning goal or a potential hire, the pattern is the same: what gets seen is not the full field. It’s what passes through a series of invisible filters first.

Just like VAR, the system creates distance between the decision and the decision-maker. “The algorithm flagged it.” “The system ranked them lower.” “The review confirmed it.” The language sounds objective, but the judgment is still there; it’s just been outsourced to something that feels harder to challenge.

Which brings us to why we’re building what we’re building. Last week we announced that we’re working on a Talent Marketplace designed to reduce bias where it actually starts, not after the decision, but before it (read the BetaKit article here). The platform removes names, photos, and other identifying details from candidate profiles before hiring teams ever see them. So instead of being influenced by signals like a name, a background, or a university, the first impression is grounded in skills and experience.

Whether it’s a referee watching a replay or a hiring manager scanning a shortlist, the challenge is making sure judgment is actually being applied to the right things.

VAR didn’t remove referees from soccer, it just changed where the decisions get shaped. Hiring technology is no different. We already know bias exists in the system, but we have to determine if the system is built to catch it or quietly pass it along.

Team Toast 🥂

P.S. you can join the waitlist for the Toast Talent Marketplace here.

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