Parzival Partners, a Leeds-based executive search firm specialising in the global technology sector, has unveiled its proprietary AI recruitment technology, ‘ZeroBias Search’, in collaboration with neighbouring Leeds cybersecurity scale-up, BlackDice.
The new tech claims to completely eliminate hiring bias, helping tech companies to diversify their talent pools and boost business performance.
Research from Boston Consulting Group has found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19 per cent higher revenues due to their innovation. Despite this, Tech Nation reports that women represent just 26 per cent of the workforce in UK tech, with just nine per cent of C-Suite leaders in tech companies being female – only three per cent of whom are chief technology officers (CTO’s) or technical directors.
“Many DE&I programmes fail due to recruiters employing a numbers-focused approach and just collecting as many CVs as possible,” said Tom Bennett, co-founder at Parzival Partners. “The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t remove the biases and barriers that get in the way of hiring the most brilliant talent.”
Parzival’s proprietary augmented AI system, Big AL, the engine that powers the ZeroBias Search methodology, is designed to combat traditional talent sourcing challenges. The ZeroBias Search eradicates unintentional biases which frequently influence candidate selection during the hiring process, claims Parzival.
Zero Bias has access to over 1.2 billion active and passive candidates from multiple sources, and is capable of searching both structured and unstructured data.
Sarah Hague, COO of BlackDice, added: “The innovation lies not just in its speed, but in its efficiency and fairness. By focusing solely on relevant experience, every candidate was included in an annotated long list without revealing their age, gender, ethnicity, or other personal identifiers. This meant we could select our shortlist based purely on merits. Most impressively though, was that the longlist provided by Parzival outperformed national diversity averages for each respective role. As a company that is committed to breaking down bias and promoting DEI as we scale, this was very reassuring.”
