Data Entry of Job Applications in Age Discrimination Matter

Think about the last time you filled out a job application by hand. All of the demographic information followed by exhausting details about your education and previous employment history. Page upon page, question after question. Now think of tens of thousands of these applications, each potentially holding the information to prove or disprove a case of age discrimination. Making the data searchable and thus actionable was the urgent request of our client. This meant a painstaking data entry effort to convert thousands of handwritten pages into a workable database that faithfully and accurately depicted hiring practices and whether they were in violation of ageism statutes.

About Our Client

One of our longest and most loyal partners, this litigation support vendor is on the industry’s cutting edge of technological innovations, specifically in the harnessing of artificial intelligence to assist in critical eDiscovery matters.

By the Numbers

• 75,000 pages of handwritten job applications transcribed
• 95 fields of information entered for each employment application
• ~1.4 million points of data captured at >99.5% accuracy

The Challenge

Think again about filling out that job application – how good was your penmanship? In a collection of 15,000 applications, legibility ran the gamut from good in rare cases to barely recognizable in the majority of the others. As with most applications, squeezing information into small boxes is the norm which is hard to do, even harder to extract. In many ways, our data entry personnel was tasked with both “translation” and transcription to accurately capture the data required from documents that were exceedingly hard to read. Just as important however, was consistency in the output and though some interpretation was required, writer’s intent could not be factored to ensure the evidence being gathered was defensible.

Solution

Successive rounds of pilot processing were carried out for the client and their experts to confirm the output file would align with their requirements for 2nd level analytics. The expert thoroughly reviewed the sample data to confirm the quality of the output as well as treatment of ambiguous text to ensure the data entry did not ‘cross the line’ into conjecture. As with any project of considerable size where the data entry is to be carried out on handwritten source files of multiple origins, anomalies uncovered later were brought to the attention of the expert to serve as final arbiter. The expert’s feedback was carefully compiled in a project manual/decision long which was referenced throughout the balance of the project leading to a uniform result.

Result

Over a 6 week span, our data entry specialists and quality control auditors processed over 15,000 handwritten job applications, each with 95 fields of information to be captured. It required thorough collaboration with the project management and client services teams who interfaced directly with the client and expert to deftly coordinate feedback sessions which translated to an accurate and timely delivery. In the end, this class action suit ended in a settlement of nearly $3,000,000.
Contact us at info@247digitize.com for more details.