Let's go back to talking about Tengai. Furhat's social robot was recently presented at Tatech Europe 2019, held in May in Lisbon (Portugal) and will be the protagonist of a tour that will start from Scandinavia and in the next six months will also include stops in Europe and the United States.
Tengai has had a dedicated website since July and will initially be offered by TNG in Sweden as part of the Scandinavian agency's recruitment offer. “The first product we are launching is an internal one that will be incorporated into the recruitment solution that TNG offers to clients,” says Elin Öberg Mårtenzon, Chief Innovation Officer at TNG.
An independent model of Tengai will be launched in late 2019: “This robot will be able to conduct automated job interviews at client sites and provide analysis and interview transcripts with AI-based scores.” Additionally, a standalone English-language release is planned for Q2020 XNUMX.
The automaton derives its name from the Tengai, a hat made of straw used by the Komuso, Japanese mendicant monks. The Tengai completely covered the monk's head and face. Therefore, "by wearing the Tengai, the monks 'removed their ego' and could concentrate on what was at hand and nothing else".
Nonetheless, it reads on the site:
“The name also pays homage to Tengai's 'biological mother', TNG and the company's founding mission to work on impartial recruitment, as well as Furhat Robotics' technical know-how in the field of artificial intelligence.”
The ultimate goal of the collaboration between Furhat and TNG is, moreover, extremely ambitious:
“This partnership is designed to create a more objective and impartial hiring process, contribute to social robot research, and commercialize the robot in Sweden and internationally.”
THE INTERVIEW
The job interview with the automaton as a whole may last between fifteen and eighteen minutes. The meeting with Tengai consists of three phases: welcome phase, job interview, thank you phase. Basically a before, during and after. While the initial and final phases aim "to increase involvement and create trust in the candidate", the actual interview intends to evaluate "the soft-skills and personality traits".
Candidates will previously receive information via email on how the interview will be structured and how to prepare. On the fateful morning, before everything begins, time will be given to «read the different skills required by the job».
Once seated, the candidate will find Tengai placed on the table, right in front of him. The robot will make a small introduction relating to the profile of the job in question, as well as the progress of the interview. "The aim is to clarify what skills the employer is looking for." Then the automaton will proceed to formulate the questions and interact with its interlocutor in a dialogical way. "The questions are always asked in the exact same way, in the same order, making the interview fair for all candidates."
Our goal is to ensure that:
More candidates are treated fairly, asked the same questions and evaluated under the same conditions, giving managers and recruiters more objective data on candidates regarding soft-skills and personality traits.
At the end of the interview, Tengai "will explain how to contact a recruiter if necessary and will talk about the next steps in the process". All candidates will be sent an email containing acknowledgments, the transcript of the interview and "the form used by recruiters to assess skills".
THE DEBUT
Just one week after the launch of Tengai Select, the first customer has already come forward: the municipality of Upplands-Bro. The Swedish municipality, looking for a new "digital-coordinator", "spontaneously contacted TNG", choosing to make use of Tengai for the recruitment process.
“Using digital advancement and the latest AI technology, Upplands-Bro Council will push the boundaries of how we recruit. It is very exciting to be part of the early stages of Tengai's rollout and I look forward to an even more successful recruitment process,” says Karl Öhlander, who leads the municipality of Upplands-Bro.
Therefore, at 8.30 on June 14, at the TNG headquarters in Stockholm, «Tengai conducted her first independent job interview blindly». Sinisa Strbac, Tengai's trainer, said he was very satisfied with the robot's performance: «Everything went according to plan and we are thrilled to have started!». Elin Öberg Mårtenzon was equally pleased:
“I have been working with Tengai for several months and know how great the product is, however it needs an innovative client who sees its potential. I am impressed that Upplands-Bro has taken the initiative and is the first in the world to have decided to use a social AI-robot in the hiring process. I am particularly pleased to see the public sector as our first client and look forward to following their developments as we move towards a recruitment process where AI helps us to be objective and fair!”.
This is because the narrative that accompanies Tengai focuses heavily on the neutrality of the robot, a founding element of the audacious project involving the two companies (Furhat and TNG):
“Develop the world's first ever social interview robot; a tool that helps make the recruitment process fairer for job seekers and offers all candidates a level playing field during job interviews, regardless of their age, gender, origin or appearance.
Therefore a refined blend of impartiality and objectivity that should make Tengai immune from prejudice and discrimination. In short, that peculiar figure that has earned the robot the nickname of "unbiased".
OBJECTIVITY AND PREJUDICE
“It is becoming very popular for organizations to be able to say they have a discrimination-free hiring process. We want to take this idea as far as possible,” said Havva Ilhan, Deputy Chief of Staff at Upplands-Bro Municipality. Ilhan herself adds:
“All we want to know is what skills the candidate has. We are not interested in hobbies, family relationships, age or anything else that is immaterial and could create a preconceived image of the person when choosing who will go forward in the recruitment process”.
In fact, the watchwords that resonate today in terms of recruitment in large Hi-Tech companies, but not only, concern an all-out fight against prejudice and discrimination, inclusion, diversity in the workplace, equity, accessibility. It is the trend of the moment, sometimes pursued with conviction, sometimes a convenient litmus test.
Eradicating bias and discrimination from the selection process is a difficult task, probably impossible to fully achieve. At TNG they are aware of this and are therefore content to mitigate the bias.
“To sum up, there is no magic bullet against bias, and completely removing bias from the recruiting process, or from other aspects of our lives, may never be achievable. However, we believe that a recruiting robot could add another layer of transparency and consistency to the process,” says Gabriel Skantze, a professor at KTH Stockholm and Chief Scientist of the Tengai project at Furhat Robotics.
Nonetheless, the problem is concrete, widespread and felt, both on the side of companies and on that of workers. Thus, while it takes about seven seconds to make a first impression on a person, a recent study of a total of 2000 managers showed that a third of them make a hiring decision in just 90 seconds. 60%, on the other hand, state that they need between five and fifteen minutes.
Workers, on the other hand, according to research carried out by TNG in 2018, basically agree that the experience of selection is subjective and to a large extent unfair [unfair]. In fact, as many as 73% of the sample of interviewees believe they have been discriminated against on the basis of various prejudices (related to age, gender, ethnicity, any handicaps, sexual preferences, appearance, tattoos, weight or health). 24% say they are sure, then, that it was the appearance that jeopardized the success of the trial.
ROBOTIC NEUTRALITY
Precisely to eliminate the incidence of these factors, considerable efforts were made in training Tengai, as Sinisa Strbac underlines, so that the robot is as immune as possible:
“Tengai only records candidates' words, which it converts into text in real time. No other variables are involved, such as a person's accent or tone of voice, appearance or gender. We also don't let Tengai know anything about the candidates. The only thing we have access to are candidates' names and email addresses. And we don't use this information for the purpose of identifying specific candidates."
In order to be even more objective and impartial, Tengai leaves no room for digressions or digressions of any kind, including those chats that are usually made to break the ice and establish some empathy, especially at the beginning of the interview:
“There is no availability for additional words or narrative that are not directly related to a question asked by Tengai. All questions are asked in exactly the same way: in the same tone and usually in the same order. In this way the interview is more fair and objective».
Unlike a human recruiter, the robot also does not give rise to accommodation and interpretations regarding the answers of the candidates: «With Tengai all this is avoided», concludes the chief scientist of TNG.
Sinisa Strbac nonetheless acknowledges that the medal also has its flip side: "What we could risk missing out is the detail and personalization that can provide a complete picture of a candidate's suitability for a [job] position." However, this risk appears to be limited by the fact that Tengai was designed primarily to be used "at the beginning of the selection process, where it is advantageous to be objective and focused on skills in order to find the skills required by the job". Instead, remarks Strbac, the use of the robot will allow «… to avoid the unconscious prejudice that we all possess. By doing this early in the selection stage, we move subjectivity later in the process (where it is less harmful).'
A SUSTAINABLE ACT OF TRUST
In conclusion,
"Tengai will conduct effective blind interviews with skill-based and situational questions, produce an interview analysis, as well as a candidate interview score."
TNG says she is certain that the automaton will worthily fulfill the task assigned to it:
“Tengai levels the playing field and gives all applicants an equal opportunity to demonstrate their expertise and personality, with no unconscious bias influencing the assessment.”
Time will tell if things actually go in the direction TNG wants. What we can already say now, however, is that Tengai represented a real challenge for those who had to design and train it. Indeed, the creation of the automaton posed many challenges: from understanding language to managing indeterminacy, from dealing with ambiguity to interacting with humans, etc.
In order to face them, the latest discoveries in the field of artificial intelligence have been used, such as the prerogative of learning in a (more or less) independent way thanks to machine learning, the predictive qualities of the latest generation algorithms, the boundless analysis and processing capabilities some data. If you are interested, stay tuned, because these will be the topics we will deal with in the near future.
