Bias in recruitment isn't a scandal. It's a default.
Nobody sets out to hire unfairly. Hiring managers don't arrive at work planning to discount the candidate from a lesser-known university, or unconsciously favour the one whose career path mirrors their own, or skim-read the CV that arrived at 4:58pm on a Friday with half the attention it deserved.
It just happens. Because humans are human — pattern-matching, energy-depleting, context-dependent creatures who bring their entire life experience into every decision they make, including this one.
AI doesn't fix everything. But done properly, it removes a remarkable number of the places where bias quietly creeps in. Here's where /avlo: does exactly that.
The job description comes first
Bias in hiring often starts before a single application arrives — in the language of the job advert itself.
Research is pretty clear on this: adverts loaded with words like "competitive," "dominant," and "driven" attract fewer female applicants. Ones that lead with rigid requirements rather than growth potential put off candidates who don't see themselves reflected in the brief. The words you choose before anyone applies shapes who applies at all.
/avlo: generates job descriptions and adverts in deliberately neutral, non-gendered language. The focus is on what the role actually requires — responsibilities, skills, experience — not the personality archetype of whoever wrote the brief at 9am on a Monday. A better advert means a more diverse pool. A more diverse pool means better hiring. It starts there.
Your CV syntax is not the point
Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough: a lot of CV screening — human and AI — is effectively a formatting test.
Bullet points vs. paragraphs. Headers in the right place. Dates formatted consistently. Clean, logical structure throughout. Candidates who present information the "right" way score well. Candidates who don't — regardless of whether the experience underneath is outstanding — get caught in the filter.
For neurodivergent candidates in particular, this is a significant and largely invisible barrier. Someone with ADHD, dyslexia, or autism may present their experience in ways that don't map neatly onto the expected template — not because their experience is lacking, but because their brain works differently.
/avlo: reads for semantic meaning. What did this person actually do? What did they own? What did they deliver? The formatting is noise. The substance is the signal. We read the signal.
"We did this together" is not a red flag
As covered in part one of this series, passive and collaborative language in CVs is more commonly associated with how women write than how men do. "We delivered the project." "The team achieved." "Supported the rollout of."
Most screening tools — and plenty of human readers — interpret this as a lack of ownership. /avlo: interprets it as a question worth asking.
Rather than penalising a writing style, we flag it as a point for clarification. The candidate gets the chance to explain their individual contribution. The recruiter gets a more accurate picture. Nobody loses a job because they were brought up to share the credit.
We don't know your name
/avlo: assesses candidates on their experience and skills. It doesn't know — and doesn't factor in — what your name is, where you grew up, or where you went to school.
This matters more than it might seem. There's substantial evidence that CVs with traditionally white British names receive more callbacks than identical CVs with names that read as ethnic minority. School and university names carry social signal that has nothing to do with job performance. Postcodes tell a story that may be entirely irrelevant to whether someone can do the work.
None of that information changes a /avlo: recommendation. What changes it is experience, demonstrated skills, and relevance to the brief. That's it.
And while we're here — portrait photos on CVs seem to be making a quiet comeback in the UK, which is a peculiar trend we'd rather not see take hold. /avlo: never sees a photo. It couldn't care less.
No pedigree bias
A candidate from a well-known employer with a recognisable logo doesn't get a better read than one who built equivalent experience at a smaller, less familiar business.
/avlo: reads what people have done, not where they did it. The person who led a finance function at a regional SME and the one who did something similar at a FTSE 100 are assessed on the same basis: what did you own, what did you deliver, and does it match what we need?
Brand recognition is not a proxy for competence. We treat it accordingly.
No career break penalty
A gap in a CV is not a verdict.
People take time out for all sorts of reasons — caring responsibilities, health, redundancy, travel, burnout, raising children. A human recruiter skimming quickly might clock the gap and move on. /avlo: doesn't penalise employment history that doesn't follow a straight line. What matters is the experience that's there, not the months that aren't accounted for.
The 200th CV gets the same read as the first
This one is underrated.
Human attention is finite. A recruiter reviewing their fiftieth application of the morning is not bringing the same focus they had at number one. By the time they reach the pile that arrived on Friday afternoon, they're running on habit and heuristics rather than genuine evaluation.
/avlo: doesn't have a 4pm. It doesn't have a bad day. It doesn't have a backlog of other things it's supposed to be doing. Every candidate gets the same quality of attention, applied against the same criteria, every single time.
Consistency isn't a nice-to-have. In hiring, it's a fairness issue.
The same standard. Applied the same way. To everyone.
Each of these things individually is meaningful. Together, they add up to something that's genuinely different from how most screening — human or automated — actually works.
The brief is the brief. The criteria are the criteria. Every candidate who applies gets a thorough, considered, consistent read — regardless of their name, their background, their formatting choices, their writing style, or what time their CV arrived.
That's not a feature. That's a principle.
The best person for the job is somewhere in that pile. /avlo: is built to find them — whoever they are, however they write, wherever they're from.
Part of the /avlo: USP Series — a look at what makes us different, one feature at a time.
Early access is open at avlo.uk
