This is our story

With Tengai, we challenge the traditional job interview and open up "the black box of recruitment." Our vision is to create a fair and objective process where candidates can showcase their full potential, while employers gain access to a modern, efficient, and accurate recruitment solution.

The idea behind Tengai was born in 2017 at the Swedish recruitment and staffing company TNG, where a team of HR specialists initiated the innovation lab TNGx. With over 20 years of experience in unbiased, data-driven, structured, and competency-based recruitment, TNG has always aimed to create an inclusive, fair, and transparent candidate experience. At the same time, the company works to minimize the impact of unconscious bias—all to contribute to a more sustainable labor market.

Driving change through innovation

To realize its vision, TNG developed its own recruitment tools to help recruiters make objective and well-informed decisions during selection and evaluation phases. However, when analyzing the personal interview—the most critical part of the recruitment process—unconscious bias emerged as the final major obstacle.

In response, TNGx assembled a diverse team of specialists, leaders, and recruiters to merge unbiased recruitment methodology with an innovative Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) software solution. The vision was to create a human-like, safe, and fair interview experience where candidates could feel comfortable being honest and showcasing their true potential.

At the same time, the goal was to provide recruiters and hiring managers with objective and actionable data on candidates' soft skills and personality traits—key elements for making more accurate hiring decisions. This marked the beginning of the journey that would lead to the creation of Tengai.

Starting point

In 2018, the Swedish award-winning tech company specializing in social robotics, Furhat Robotics entered a collaboration with Tengai. Making it possible for us to implement our unbiased diversity and inclusion software on Furhats operating system. In other words, Furhat Robotics provided the conversational platform on which we programmed the D&I software application. And it’s the software that controls how Tengai behaves and her capacity to conduct structured and situational-based interviews. A great example of a successful collaboration between innovative companies with one shared mission.

In 2019, we completed one year of beta-testing and Tengai finally became available for clients in Sweden. To grow on the international market, we became incorporated and thus separated from our "birth mother" TNG. 

During 2019, Tengai and the team participated in a lot of events and we shared the exciting development with the world. Tengai even got awarded “Best Newcomer” by the National Online Recruitment Awards 2019 in the UK.

2020 was a big year for us because our methodology was validated by Psychometrics AB. This assured us that Tengai accurately could make data-driven assessments without any human interference. The study also validated that Tengai's interview is assessing work performance and can be used to contribute to a more unbiased interview process. At this time, we also released user-friendly software for recruiters, to make the process even more transparent.

 2022: Tengai goes digital

Now, Tengai has developed into a digital avatar, without a physical robot body. While the conversational AI and unbiased framework have stayed the same, we received feedback that the robot interface was inconvenient for both the candidates and recruiters. We, therefore, developed a new interface for Tengai, which still is interactive and has human-like behavior. Tengai's "personality" is still the same, but the digital version of Tengai takes away any physical limitations candidates experience. Which creates an even more inclusive screening experience.