When Loren Larsen talks about the unfairness of employers’ recruitment processes, he assumes an evangelistic tone. There is a “disease called bias” in most hiring systems, Mr Larsen says. He has a “medicine” to cure it.

Yet the challenge for Mr Larsen, chief technology officer for HireVue, a Salt Lake City-based provider of online recruitment tools, is that critics fear products from his and other similar companies risk leaving the patient at least as ill as before.

HireVue is one of the most widely used of a series of recruitment platforms offering services powered by various forms of artificial intelligence to assess candidates. While the systems assess applications more quickly and cheaply than humans, their main selling point is that they eliminate human recruiters’ biases.