Our mission is not just to avoid bias in employment decisions, but that our AI used to actively promote diversity and aid in the achievement of equal opportunity for everyone regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, or disability status. While our goal is to amplify, augment, empower, and enhance human performance, we recognize that there already are existing power imbalances in society that need to be considered.

To ensure a fair AI without algorithmic bias, we have developed several bias mitigation strategies. One strategy we have had from the beginning is to never use face recognition software with our AI to take away any chance of possible discrimination based on appearance. In addition to this, we developed our AI without any access to candidates' personal, identifiable data and made the interview process exactly the same for every candidate in each specific process.

Our AI is interactive in its nature, meaning that we encourage a conversation between the candidate and the AI and use natural language understanding (NLU) which gives it the ability to understand human language as it is spoken. The bi-directional conversation is possible through our NLU that we constantly tweak to pick up nuances in language depending on demographic. Saying "Yes" and "Aaarg" (if you're a pirate) is equally valid, one is just more common than the other. The interactive aspect of our AI is what creates a fun candidate experience. But to create a bias-free assessment, candidates' answers are always processed through a scientifically proven framework that ensures that only the quality of the answers is taken into account. Our AI never considers the length of the answers or the language quality - meaning that just because the candidate has an accent in a foreign language does not mean they should be treated differently.

A final example of a bias mitigation strategy we implement at Tengai is having a diverse team with individuals from different backgrounds, ages, and gender identities. We believe that representation and having a diverse development team are crucial to mitigating subconscious stereotypes and not getting a collective blind spot. By allowing different perspectives, we can examine our AI in a more critical way and examine how bias could influence our AI.

Read about our AI ethical principles >

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