Firm creates robot head to interview people without being biased

Often candidates for job interviews face biasness while being employed. A new firm is trying to change this by introducing a new robot that will conduct interviews without judging interviewees.

Swedish recruitment agency TNG has been using an artificially intelligent robot head called Tengai since few months to conduct test interviews in place of a human recruiter.

From May, the robotic head will actually begin conducting interviews for actual jobs and will eliminate biases human recruiters often bring to the hiring process, reported Futurism.

Tengai was developed by a conversational AI and social robotics startup called Furhat Robotics. The company designed the robot head to be placed on a table at about eye level with a job candidate. The robot then asks the person a series of questions with its voice and face designed to mimic human inflections and expressions.

Video Courtesy: Furhat Robotics/YouTube

Tengai will ask every question in the same order and the same way. It will then provide a human recruiter with a transcript of the candidate’s answers so they can make a decision about the candidate. Both the companies believe that with Tengai, they can make the screening process more fair while still giving it a ‘human’ touch.

“I was quite skeptical at first before meeting Tengai, but after the meeting I was absolutely struck,” healthcare recruiter Petra Elisson, who has been involved in the testing, told BBC. “At first I really, really felt it was a robot, but when going more deeply into the interview I totally forgot that she’s not human.”

Furhat Robotics, for the future, plan to program the robot to make its own decisions on which applicant should process to the next session of interviews. The company already has an English-language version of the bot in development and plans to roll it out in early 2020.