Interview Robot Tengai Market Ready in Sweden - TNG includes Product in its Unbiased Recruitment Services

On May 15, 2019, TNG, a Swedish staffing and recruitment agency, launched in-house product Tengai - the world's first social interview recruiter robot - as part of its unbiased recruitment service in Sweden. Tengai is the first physical AI-robot in the world, programmed with an inclusion and diversity software and can objectively evaluate soft-skills and personality traits. 

The Swedish recruitment and staffing agency TNG has worked and developed an unbiased recruitment process for the past 15 years and is now taking the next step to disrupt the job interview. Introducing Tengai as an innovative tool that can be integrated into the recruitment process to make it less biased and fair for all candidates. Together with Furhat Robotics the company has developed Tengai Unbiased, a diversity and Inclusion software, in the appearance of a social interview AI-robot.  

While Furhat created the physical robot, TNG started shaping Tengai and its software during the fall of 2018 to become more human-like and capable of performing interviews. The algorithm behind the robot is based on TNG’s methodology that has been developed during the past 15 years. Tengai is an inclusion and diversity software with a natural language processing engine, making it unique to all HR-tech developments on the market. To avoid giving the robot its own bias, the TNG programmers are diverse based on age, gender, personality and background, and so is the recruiters part of the project. The code will also be checked on a regular basis to avoid algorithm bias.

Tengai will perform and assess blind interviews, screen for soft skills and help identify personality traits. This will create a more unbiased recruitment process and the focus is to help recruiters to make informed hiring decisions after the job interview. Additionally, Tengai will produce interview transcripts and scoring cards to support data-driven hiring decisions starting at the first stage of the interview process. By integrating Tengai in the interview phase, recruiters and managers will have more time to engage with the right candidates at the end of the recruitment funnel.

“Humans naturally make assumptions and recruiters are often forced to make decisions based on very little information in the interview phase, which makes them turn to their gut-feeling for help.” - Elin Öberg Mårtenzon, Chief Innovation Officer på TNG Group and Tengai.

Interview questions

Tengai will assist recruiters and hiring managers with performing job interviews, and objectively screen for soft skills and personality traits. The AI-robot is programmed to ask open-ended and closed situational based questions to identify each candidates’ strengths and weaknesses but without letting presumptions or unconscious bias influence the evaluation. The questions are always asked in the exact same way, in the same order, making the interview fair for all candidates. By using Tengai during the initial interview, more job-applicants can be assessed, which increases the chance for candidate quality and higher retention rates. 

A more honest candidate experience

Before the launch, over 200 candidates tested Tengai and the interest in the project proved to be significant, and the test candidates’ reactions were predominantly positive. In fact, 76 percent said they would recommend using robots in recruitment contexts to others and would like to participate in an interview again.

More than half of the test participants also said they could give more honest and factual answers during the robot interview compared to a traditional interview. The could be more honest because they didn’t have to take into account the recruiter’s body language or response and adjust their answers to what they felt would be what the recruiter or hiring manager wanted to hear.

Tengai, is now available as an in-house staffing product and is included in TNG’s unbiased recruitment process. During the next few months, the company will continue to develop the product and launch a stand-alone unit in Sweden at the end of 2019. An automated English-speaking robot will be market ready during the first quarter of 2020. The interview robot will then be able to conduct unbiased job-interviews, collect objective interview data, assess and score the outcome to help recruiters and hiring managers to make better hiring decisions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:¨

Charlotte Ulvros, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer, TNG and Tengai

Phone: +46 70-982 84 75 or e-mail Charlotte.ulvros@tng.se