About Us

The Problem

The statistics around discrimination in hiring is shocking with over a third of people saying they have been turned down from a job due to discrimination. Whether it’s discrimination around age, gender, ethnicity or disabilities it exists in almost every industry. And a lot of the time this discrimination is due to the unconscious bias – stereotypical views of specific groups of people outside of our conscious awareness. 

Although businesses and individuals have massively increased awareness around discrimination and bias, it can still be hard to detect, monitor and reduce, particularly in recruitment. At each stage of the hiring process unconscious bias can be prevalent. For example, the style, length and format of a CV may differ from culture to culture, and our unconscious bias will likely favour those that are written and presented in a style that we stereotypically deem as ‘good’. 

Unfortunately in society, some more obvious indicators of unconscious bias exist: The largest study into resume bias at Kings College London, that looked at over 12,000 job applications found 

“Applicants with English names received 26.8% of positive responses for leadership roles. Non-English names received 11.3%. Applicants with English names received 21.2% of positive responses for non-leadership positions, while non-English names received 11.6%.”

This illustrates why the recruitment processes needs engineering, and we need novel ways that ensures everyone who applies for a role gets equal treatments and assessed based on their skills, experience and interests, not their gender, age, ethnicity or disability. 

Levelling the playing field

We launched ai.r as we are passionate about combatting bias in recruitment, business and society at large. 

We know we have a long way to go, but we feel by re-engineering the hiring process using tools such as automated candidate masking and blind interviews can help with this. But we also understand that modern recruitment is wrought with processing high-volumes of CVs and applicant data, and a lot of admin. 

So, using the latest technologies we are building ai.r to reduce as much of recruiting admin as possible, whilst providing tools that help to ensure your business reduces the bias in the early stages of the recruitment process. 

Our aim is to help you find the very best people for your business, whilst giving you the peace of mind and confidence that you are doing everything you can to help reduce bias and discrimination in society.