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A London scientist has created an artificial intelligence to work as a “recruiter” that can avoid bias towards the “old boys’ network” of white, male Oxbridge-educated job candidates.

Tom Bowles’s software is intended to replace human headhunters who perform hours of tasks such as searching Google and checking sites like Crunch Base and LinkedIn.

It can tell if a candidate has performed particularly well with a company after moving to a new city, and identify rapid career progression.

Dr Bowles said that by analysing these factors the AI “knows” if a person would be right for a company — removing unconscious bias towards certain groups that employers may have.

The next phase is getting the AI to interview job candidates on video. The AI has been coded so that it continually learns by training itself.

The project was commissioned by the London-based Founders Factory, which helps to identify the new generation of digital entrepreneurs.

Dr Bowles, who spent a year writing the AI’s complex algorithms, said many good candidates were not being identified by recruiters despite being suited for the role. “By looking at each individual in the context of what they have achieved, within their relevant field, biases like gender or location can be minimised,” he said.

“AI can have a significant impact on diversity because it doesn’t care about someone’s background, it only sees the potential within them.

“What I was trying to do was take out the human bias, [for example] the bias of one school versus another.

“If I’d gone to the very best school and the very best university I’d probably come out of that situation with a fairly good network. So the chance of me doing well in life would be probably quite strong — the network makes a big opportunity for you.”

He added: “We look at how fast people are progressing through their career, are they good at working with people, are they showing promise? We’ve got indicators [such as] where they’ve relocated and suddenly done very well, where they’ve worked with fast-growth companies.

“In the way you or I might start doing Google searches, the AI does the same. It puts people into a database and it correlates them, and it produces reports.”

Dr Bowles previously worked on a project at atom-smasher CERN that used its mammoth computing power to collect and analyse data to help fight breast cancer.