From the desk of a Chief People Officer — to CEOs, hiring managers, recruiters, hiring teams, and staffing agencies.

We need to stop making hiring decisions for people based on where they live.

Too many hiring processes quietly build geographic gates into their ATS and screening rules: “must live within X miles,” “no applicants outside these zip codes,” or automatic rejections for addresses in certain neighborhoods. On the surface that looks like efficiency. In practice it’s discrimination by proxy — it disproportionately excludes people who can’t afford downtown rents or affluent suburbs but are willing and capable of commuting 30–90 minutes every day.

I’ve seen it in the real world. I know professionals in Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago who regularly commute one to one-and-a-half hours each way and do so reliably — by train, bus, rideshare, or a combination of options. I’ve known people who deliberately chose longer commutes to access better jobs, better managers, or better career paths. I myself relocated within and outside Illinois several times for career opportunities, and during a summer internship I lived with my aunt in the northwest suburbs so I could work in a different part of the region. If that company had thrown away my application because my address said “south suburbs,” I would have lost an important experience — and they would have lost a committed hire.

The problem: zip-code screening causes disparate impact — and misses the real signal

Filtering candidates by zip code or keeping a rigid radius assumes location equals reliability. That assumption harms people who:

Can’t afford to live in expensive urban cores or affluent suburbs but can and will commute.
Rely on public transit or carpooling solutions that don’t correlate neatly with a straight-line radius.
Split time between family homes, temporary housing, or second residences for caregiving or financial reasons.

This approach creates a disparate impact on lower-income populations, and often on racial and ethnic minorities who are excluded from the most expensive neighborhoods due to systemic housing inequities. Even when the filtering logic is facially neutral, its outcomes are not.

Worse: equating distance with attendance confuses correlation and causation. Poor attendance is a behavioral issue — an individual pattern of choices, barriers, or circumstances — not a function of a home address.

The right signal: behavior, not geography

If your goal is to reduce tardiness and absenteeism, ask about behavioral predictors and past performance, not anchor hiring decisions to an address field.

Ask the right questions during screening and interviewing:

“Tell me about a time you needed to manage a challenging commute or personal barrier — how did you ensure you arrived on time?”
“Have you ever been disciplined or fired for attendance? If so, what happened and what did you learn?”
“What supports or schedules help you consistently meet your start times?”
“How far are you willing to commute to work?” or “Are you within a commutable distance?” (Let the candidate define commutable.)

These types of questions get to values and behaviors — willingness to solve for punctuality, past patterns, and practical arrangements — rather than making assumptions about someone’s life based on a zip code.

Practical solutions hiring teams can implement today

1. Remove automatic geographic disqualifiers

Audit your ATS and sourcing filters. Remove automatic rules that reject candidates based on zip code or a rigid radius. Replace them with open-text commute questions or make commute/location fields optional during initial sourcing.

2. Change screening language and prompts

Replace “must live within X miles / zip code” with:

“Are you within a commutable distance?”
“How far/willing are you to commute?”
“Are you able to reliably maintain the schedule required for this role?”

Make these early-stage, candidate-controlled responses that inform — not pre-decide — your screening process.

3. Use behavior-based screening for attendance risk

Ask for specific behavioral history rather than assuming future behavior from location. Questions like:

“Describe a time you managed attendance under a difficult personal or commuting circumstance.”
“Have you ever been disciplined for attendance? What changed after that experience?”

Reference checks can include targeted questions about reliability and punctuality, which reflect actual past workplace behavior.

4. Offer flexibility and supports where feasible

If attendance risk is a genuine business concern, build supports that minimize that risk while broadening the talent pool:

Flexible start times or core-hour windows (e.g., 9–10:30am start window with core hours).
Hybrid or remote-first roles when work allows.
Transit stipends, commuter benefits, parking subsidies, or pre-tax transit options.
Compressed workweeks or occasional remote days to reduce commuting burden.

These solutions often improve retention and morale — and they broaden your candidate pipeline.

5. Track, measure, and adapt

If you believe commute correlates with turnover in your organization, measure it rather than assume it. Track applicant addresses, hire locations, retention, and attendance outcomes (anonymized and aggregated) and test whether commute distance actually predicts poor outcomes. Use that data to design fair, evidence-based policies.

6. Train recruiters and hiring managers

Teach teams to recognize geographic bias. A candidate who lives farther away isn’t a risk by default — but a candidate who demonstrates a pattern of tardiness or resistance to reasonable scheduling needs may be. Provide interview guides that focus on behavior, not location.

A short checklist for immediate change

Remove automatic zip-code rejections from ATS.
Add candidate-facing commute questions instead of exclusionary radius filters.
Use behavioral interview questions about attendance and reliability.
Pilot flexible scheduling or hybrid options for roles where possible.
Collect and analyze data on commute vs retention/attendance before enacting restrictive rules.
Train hiring teams to avoid assumptions about residence and reliability.

Final word — hire people, not proxies

When we reject candidates because of a zip code, we are making a decision about someone’s life circumstances — often because it's the easy technical setting in our ATS. But easy isn’t the same as fair or effective.

We hire for potential, values, and demonstrated behaviors. We coach and support people to show up, and we design workplaces that reduce unnecessary barriers. If someone is willing to commute an hour because your job is exactly the opportunity they need, let them make that choice. Don’t make it for them.

If your organization wants to be serious about inclusive hiring, start by removing the geographic gatekeepers. Ask smart questions that reveal behavior. Offer flexible solutions that retain talent. And remember: a home address is a datapoint, not a destiny.

When a zip code becomes a gatekeeper: why excluding candidates by address hurts diversity, and what to do instead