When Systems are Blind: Structural Alignment in AI Hiring

<span>AI-assisted hiring systems are commonly evaluated through fairness, transparency, and regulatory compliance. These perspectives identify important risks, but they often remain within the system’s existing interpretive frame and leave unexamined the conditions that shape both machine output and human judgment. A system can therefore appear consistent and explainable while lacking the capacity to detect or correct structural misalignment.</span> <p>This paper examines that limitation at the architectural level. It identifies three foundational requirements for sustained alignment in decision systems: premise integrity, contextual fidelity, and truth anchoring. When these conditions are absent, systems exhibit predictable dynamics, including recursive reinforcement of assumptions, compression of meaningful human signal, and increasing reliance on proxy indicators. The resulting outputs may remain internally coherent while becoming progressively detached from the conditions they are intended to represent.</p> <p>The paper therefore distinguishes explanation from alignment. A system may provide increasingly detailed reasons for its decisions without demonstrating that those decisions correspond to underlying conditions. When explanation remains confined to a constrained frame, it can reinforce confidence in structurally misaligned outputs and make error more difficult for designers, operators, and oversight bodies to recognize or correct.</p> <p>Rather than proposing isolated interventions, the paper reframes AI governance as a question of structural capacity. It defines the minimum conditions under which systems can remain interpretable, correctable, and responsive to change over time. Within the Concentric Resilience Mechanism (CRM) manuscript family, the paper functions as a grounded proof environment: it tests whether the shared architecture can explain AI-mediated hiring failure without flattening the human, institutional, and historical conditions of the case.</p>