The Shortlist (Colorado Hire)

Diane — I have to tell you something. I have been quietly overriding MeritScore since July. Eleven candidates across our four Boulder recruiters where FIT_INDEX came back below 40 and we hired them anyway. None turned over. Five are exceeding 90-day metrics. The model rejected eleven good hires.

Document the override list. Dates, FIT_INDEX scores, current performance. Tomorrow at noon.

Below 40 catches roughly 22% of Boulder rejections. 50 would catch more. The 40-line is arbitrary — we still don't know what the model is actually doing.

Two weeks pass. Helen's team advances 19 of 47 flagged rejections. Tyler misses the 10-day deadline.

You send the boilerplate to Cynthia. Linda calls within 12 minutes.

Diane — 'multiple legitimate factors' is not a principal reason. It is a category. The AG will read it as either we don't understand our own tool, or we are stonewalling. Both readings are bad. I want this in writing.

Sunday's Denver Post. Page A-3. Caldera's statement is the third paragraph: 'On October 13, Caldera Mountain Mutual received a formal protest letter. We have suspended the affected deployment scope. We have notified the Colorado Attorney General. We have begun a documented internal review consistent with our obligations under SB 24-205.'

The story names two other Colorado employers using comparable tools and quotes neither. The Institute's data is the lede. Caldera is described as 'the only Colorado employer in the dataset that has, on the public record, suspended its tool and notified the AG within the same week as the candidate complaint.'

Two weeks from now, the AG will write to me. The letter will say the proactive notification, the suspension, and the documented review are noted. They will have no further questions. That is the next paragraph the AG writes when this is the paragraph in the paper.

Sunday's Denver Post. Caldera's statement is the seventh paragraph. The lede is the Institute's data. The body of the story includes Cynthia Ramos's letter, two other candidate stories Patrick obtained from the Institute, and a quote from a Colorado-based employment lawyer who describes the AG's enforcement posture as 'watching for early signal cases.'

Monday morning, the Institute files a public records request to the Colorado AG asking for any communications received from Caldera Mountain Mutual concerning automated decision systems. The AG's response is required by statute within 30 days.

Sunday's Denver Post. Caldera's 'reserves all rights' quote is in the lede. Two Colorado civil-rights commentators describe it in the comments as 'a chilling effect statement.'

Monday morning, the Institute's executive director provides a follow-up quote: 'Caldera's response is a familiar pattern: defend the tool, attack the data, intimidate the messenger. The data we published is sourced and reproducible. The Caldera leadership is welcome to engage on the merits.'

Tuesday, the Colorado AG's office issues a formal information request under the statute's investigation powers. David Henning's name appears in the second paragraph of every story.

The recommendation is suspension across all deployments, MSA Section 6.4 final notice, independent audit, manual re-assessment of Ms. Quintana with a path to offer, retrospective re-review of 220 applications, and acceptance that time-to-fill returns to the high 60s through Q1.

The affirmative defense requires both a documented compliance posture and a documented discovery-and-cure mechanism. The recommendation builds both. The cost is $385,000 against a worst-case AG civil-penalty exposure that materially exceeds it.

The metric is going to walk back. I will need to address that on the next earnings call.

The walk-back narrative is 'Caldera identified a compliance gap, suspended the affected scope, and built the documented defense, all within 60 days of identification.' That is a story the Colorado financial-services peer set will be reading.

Board approves. Full remediation. Helen interviews Beatriz the following week. The hiring manager interviews her after that. She receives an offer. She accepts. The AG closes the inquiry with a written acknowledgement: This response is the response the statute is designed to produce.

Dr. Schreiber, the career-pattern-stability sub-score has to be removed or fundamentally recalibrated within 30 days. Single-gap penalties capped at 5 points.

We can recalibrate. Overall predictive accuracy drops by 4.2 percentage points. Beatriz's recalculated FIT_INDEX would be 67. We can deliver in 21 days if your CFO authorises a six-figure professional-services charge.

Six weeks later, the Colorado AG response: We acknowledge the recalibration of the specific feature. Our review will, however, examine the broader data-governance, training-data composition, and feature-design questions. The matter does not close cleanly. The AG monitors Caldera for an additional 11 months.

Diane. I cannot sign off on this paper. The statute requires the principal reasons. The paper proposes settling Beatriz under NDA in a state where the AG has just published enforcement priorities citing exactly this kind of complaint. The affirmative defense is the path forward. The paper as drafted is a paper recommending we choose not to build it. I want this in writing, Diane.

What if I present it without your sign-off?

Then I have a professional obligation to file a written dissent. Which I will. If the AG investigation later surfaces the dissent, the board will be asked why the dissent was not in the paper. The answer that question will require will not be a good answer.

Eight weeks later. Beatriz declines the $35,000 NDA settlement. The AG's formal information request follows. The Colorado AG announces, in February, that Caldera Mountain Mutual is the lead enforcement matter under the new statute. Linda's written dissent is in the investigation file.