Alison Callwood
Innovating the interview process to create fairer employment opportunities for all
Project
Sammi-Select
URL
Location
South East England
Theme
ICT
Innovating the interview process to create fairer employment opportunities for all
Alison Callwood’s journey into the world of tech startups is not a typical one. Beginning her career as a Nurse and Midwife, with over 20 years’ experience in the NHS, she then moved into academic research.
An interest in making the recruitment process fairer led her to set up Sammi-Select and she remembers “totally stepping outside my comfort zone, leaving my secure bubble in healthcare education in 2020 driven by a passion for fairness.”
Sammi-Select is an innovative service that creates automated interview and assessment solutions designed to save time and reduce bias, making the recruitment processes fairer, especially for neurodivergent candidates.
“Between 15 and 20 percent of the UK population is neurodivergent,” Alison says. “This unfairness results in a significant unmet need in a rapidly growing online recruitment space.”
At the core of this work is a challenge to the unintended biases that are intrinsic to human assessment, something that’s been compounded by recent switch to online interviews. The adoption of new technologies in assessments can be associated with substantial risk as well as opportunity.
Alison now wants to instigate best practice guidance on the design and configuration of online interviews. “This work is not a luxury, it is vital.”
