Two kinds of attention, one instinct.
One half is research writing about the systems that decide who gets seen. The other is poetry. Both come from the same habit of taking what people actually say seriously.
Signed by No One
A newsletter and public advocacy project at the intersection of UX research and automated hiring systems. It exists because I have both the professional vocabulary to take these systems apart and the personal experience of being processed by them.
1.1 Billion No’s
Derek Mobley was rejected by a machine at 3 a.m., a hundred times out of a hundred. So he sued the software instead of the employers. Workday’s own filings put the number of applications its platform processed at 1.1 billion.
Quieter than a firework
A Fourth of July written somewhere the sky was not full of noise. On fifteen years in New York and what it costs to leave them, the pity narrative attached to women who live alone, and an honest accounting of who pays for one person’s quieter life.
What it costs to mean it
Authenticity gets filed under the soft values. It is the load-bearing one. On the blank line at the bottom of every automated rejection, the letter nobody signed, and what it costs to sign yours.
Made up as a courtesy
The 2026 fix for algorithmic hiring bias is to generate people who do not exist, synthesizing records for the groups the data underrepresents. A kaleidoscope holds seven pieces of glass and the mirrors do the rest. The average is where people go to disappear; the spread is where they actually live.
AI Doesn’t Teach Bravery, a lyric essay, is still in progress. The project uses my own UX research as primary source material, with the explicit goal of informing federal AI hiring regulation.
Read and subscribe on SubstackLove Me Ugly
A collection published by Vanguard Press, an imprint of Pegasus Publishers, in February 2025, under the byline Caitlin Davis-Ruiz. It follows love through its phases the way the moon moves, and brings light to the rawness rather than only the contentment.
Previously published in Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus, where it took honorable mention as a top submission. Formerly an active member of The Poetry Society of New York, currently part of the Mérida Literary Lounge.
Paperback, 126 pages · ISBN 9781837945412
View the collectionResearch and poetry are the same discipline pointed at different targets. Both are about refusing to paraphrase somebody prematurely. A verbatim loses its meaning when you summarize it, and so does a line. Most of what I have built professionally comes from that conviction: the raw thing is the evidence, and the compression is where the signal dies.