CEO at Lensa, Inc. Passionate advocate for recruiting and human resources technology that puts people first. Have you ever been recruited by a robot? The odds are high that you have. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now as much a part of job search as spaceships are of Star Wars. But how big a role does AI play in the recruiting and hiring process?

When candidates shortlisted for the strategic digital coordinator position at Sweden's Upplands-Bro Municipality showed up for their job interview in June, a 16-inch tall robot head called Tengai warmly greeted them. Sitting at eye-level on a table across the candidates, it blinked lightly and began the interview with a smile. It posed questions such as, "Can you describe a situation where you were faced with a problem that you needed to solve on your own?" Tengai could listen, speak, and react to candidates' answers while maintaining eye contact with them, thanks to its real-time visual tracking system. Occasionally, it would tilt its head, say "hmm" or lift the corners of its mouth into a smile during the interaction. "Upplands-Bro Municipality is the first employer in the world to use a social artificial intelligence-powered robot in the hiring process," says Elin Öberg Mårtenzon, chief innovation officer at TNG, the recruitment company behind Tengai.

Human resources are key to the running of any business, and the HR department is increasingly looking to technology to make recruitment a fair non-biased procedure, while using bots to help onboard new recruits and to automate many of the simple processes that all workers go through. Using bots and new technology allows HR to focus on driving the business forward through progressive strategies and finding the best people to help. Making the news recently, a Swedish recruitment firm has started using a robot to conduct job interviews, highlighting the rise of AI in recruitment. The technology packed head sits on an office desk and conducts the interviews on behalf of the recruitment agency. This comes as a stark counterpoint to the growing tales of bias, sexism, old-boys networks and other twists that can skew the outcome of a hiring process, leaving the best people for the role far behind.

That starts with recruitment and onboarding. "Having a face-to-face meeting with a human seems to be an incredibly powerful way to communicate," Samer Al Moubayed, co-founder and CEO of Furhat Robotics, told Engadget. However, he points out that even the most experienced and well-trained recruiters occasionally succumb to subconscious biases while conducting interviews -- be they based on age, gender, race or even just a candidate's responses to pre-interview chit-chat. And that's where Furhat's social robot comes in. The 16-inch tall, nearly 8-pound robot is designed to sit at eye level and provide a physical presence with which to interact, as opposed to an onscreen chatbot or virtual phone assistant.

Can artificial intelligence make the hiring process fairer? We look at that question in All Tech Considered. SHAPIRO: Lots of Fortune 500 companies use some sort of AI to screen job candidates. In Sweden, recruiters are testing an AI-powered recruitment robot. Reporter Maddy Savage went to check it out. MADDY SAVAGE, BYLINE: I'm outside the offices of TNG, one of Sweden's largest recruiting companies, which has a glass-fronted office in downtown Stockholm.

According to a recent TNG survey, 73 percent of job seekers in Sweden believe they've been discriminated against during the job application process. By replacing the human recruiter with Tengai, TNG and Furhat believe they can make the screening process more fair while still providing a "human" touch. "I was quite sceptical at first before meeting Tengai, but after the meeting I was absolutely struck," healthcare recruiter Petra Elisson, who has been involved in the testing, told the BBC. "At first I really, really felt it was a robot, but when going more deeply into the interview I totally forgot that she's not human." As for ensuring that Tengai doesn't reflect the biases of its creators and training data -- a problem that has cropped up with other AIs -- Furhat's chief scientist, Gabriel Skantze, told the BBC the company is making it a point to conduct test interviews with a diverse mix of recruiters and volunteers before Tengai is ever in the position to actually decide an applicant's employment fate.

Subconscious bias on the part of potential employers could become a thing of the past, thanks to a'robo-interviewer' currently in development. Tengai, a torso-less robot that speaks and smiles, will judge you purely on your abilities - leaving race, gender and other potentially influencing factors aside. Sweden's largest recruitment company TNG is already using the robot with the human-like interface in a series of trials. Tengai (pictured), the torso-less robot that speaks and smiles, is being trained at Sweden's largest recruitment company TNG to learn to conduct interviews through AI technology. Furhat is a social robot created by Stockholm-based startup Furhat Robotics.

The world's first robot designed to carry out unbiased job interviews is being tested by Swedish recruiters. But can it really do a better job than humans? Measuring 41cm (16in) tall and weighing 35kg (77lbs) she's at eye level as she sits on top of a table directly across from the candidate she's about to interview. Her glowing yellow face tilts slightly to the side. Then she blinks and smiles lightly as she poses her first question: "Have you ever been interviewed by a robot before?"