The Upplands-Bro Municipality in Stockholm county, Sweden, has become the first municipality in the country to use robots for recruitment, reports The Local Sweden. The purpose of the robots, which were developed by Furhat Robotics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in partnership with recruitment firm TNG, is to ensure applicants face the same interview procedure without the interviewer relying on ‘gut feeling’. The council in Upplands-Bro has already worked for some time on the development of anonymised application and CV-free recruitment. The robot, Tengai, will be used as the Upplands-Bro administration selects a new digital coordinator. Havva Ilhan, deputy head of staff at the municipality, said the idea is that Tengai will enable a human recruiter to be absent at the beginning of the process, without completely replacing that person. “It is becoming very popular for organisations to be able to say they have a discrimination-free recruitment process. We want to take this idea as far as possible,” Ilhan said. The municipality is so-far undecided as to whether to use the robot to fill future vacancies.