This Recruitment Robot May Decide Your Job In The Future

You’re set up for an interview with the company of your dream, and like always, you’re prepared to impress whoever it would be at the other end of the table. But once you walked through the door, you found out that the person you have to impress … wasn’t a person at all.

Welcome to the future. Your recruiter is now a robot.

Tengai

The recruitment agency from Sweden called TNG has used an AI robot to implement test interviews since October. This recruitment robot, ‘Tengai’, reveals an interesting scenario of what the future could be for us all. And in May, it is scheduled to be rolled out to test candidates for job positions in reality. The final goal of the AI is to remove biases that human recruiters might have while interviewing candidates. Tengai is a fine example of how AI can aid in eliminating discrimination instead of strengthening it.

Furhat Robotics, whose primary job description is to create conversational and social robots, was the one to produce Tengai. The company designed the recruitment robot head put on a table to keep it face the prospective employee's eye. It will then begin to ask the prospective addition to whatever company it served a chain of questions. All of which will be conveyed through the most life-like facial expressions as possible to bring a sense of comfort to the interviewee. 

Well, as natural as a talking head on a table could be.

Eliminate Sub-conscious Biases

There are a lot of things that humans can unconsciously make a bias out of, from gender to ethnicity. Tengai does not have the facilities to fall into these psychological traps. It asks candidates the same list of questions in exact order, with no candidates being exempted from the most professional treatment.

All of the words spoken during the interview will be transcript by the AI, printed, and sent to the appropriate authorities in human resources. With this result in hand, they can directly choose whoever they think would fit best with the position. Though Furhat aimed to remove entirely human decision-making out of the equation in the future. Tengai will eventually be completely autonomous and will decide on who to hire on its own. Currently, Tengai is only able to speak in its creators' mother-tongue being Swedish. However, the English-speaking model could roll out to interested parties by as early as 2020.

So widespread was the problem of discrimination that, according to a survey conducted by TNG itself, up to 73% of job applicants in Sweden believed that they had been a victim of this. And Tengai is TNG and Furhat's solution to this, all without sacrificing the human aspect.

To ensure that Tengai will not develop problematic biases that it was created to fight against - which is a problem popular with AIs. Gabriel Skantze - Furhat’s chief scientist - said that his company is stressing on conducting test interviews with many varied backgrounds. The result must be positive before the recruitment robot is allowed to decide the fate of applicants and the status of their employment.