The Right Person for the Job

If you thought I meant the next Prime Minister, swipe left!

But right now, there are loads of students looking for part-time work over summer and lots of live events recruiting. That's all good, apart from the growing use of automated screening software which is quietly filtering out some of the best candidates.

The recruitment landscape has undergone a silent, algorithmic revolution. Roughly 88% of companies now use some form of automated software or machine learning in their candidate screening pipelines. From CV-scanning algorithms to gamified cognitive testing and video-based facial analysis, automation promises speed, efficiency, and a supposedly objective approach to talent acquisition.

But behind the promise of algorithmic neutrality lies a troubling reality. These systems do not think or feel; they pattern-match based on past data. For candidates with physical, sensory, or neurodivergent disabilities, this reliance on rigid, ‘normalised’ datasets is creating an invisible barrier to entry, and a high chance of litigation.

Part-Time Role, Permanent Problem

Across sport, music, entertainment, and live events, summer is peak hiring season. Festivals are on the lookout for crew. Stadiums are recruiting seasonal stewards. Arenas are onboarding hospitality teams. Theatres and concert halls are filling front-of-house positions. Thousands of applications are being processed at speed, and the AI tools being deployed to manage that volume are often doing so by eliminating candidates before any actual human reads a word they have written.

Screening by Screen

Pre-recorded pieces to camera are increasingly common as part of the interview process for high-volume seasonal hiring in the UK live music and entertainment sectors. When a major promoter processes thousands of applications for festival site crew, stagehands, or event stewards, they often turn to tools that analyse speech cadence, eye contact, and facial expressions to score confidence or enthusiasm.

Whilst this is completely sensible as a practical measure, the AI tools used may have algorithms that are inherently, though not purposely, biased against certain candidates to the point of being unlawful.

For example, an applicant with cerebral palsy, a speech difference, a facial tic, or autism will find that these biometric baselines are largely flawed. An automated tool may flag an atypical vocal pattern or a lack of traditional eye contact as disengagement. The candidate is screened out without any human ever assessing their actual competency, their charisma, their safety record, or their capability to do the job.

Some practical online assessments gamify the interview process by monitoring rapid motor responses or complex visual processing on a touchscreen, which will severely disadvantage a candidate with dyspraxia or dyslexia, even where the job itself might require strategic intellect and tactical coaching experience, not fast thumbs.

Standard text-based CV-scanning AI can also create a further layer of exclusion. Algorithms routinely penalise employment gaps. For individuals who have taken time out for medical treatment, rehabilitation, or to manage a chronic health condition, the software can act as a hard filter, discarding an application before a human recruiter ever sees it.

The App Made Me Do It

From a legal perspective, the ‘the algorithm made the decision’ excuse was authoritatively dismissed some years ago.

Under section 20 of the Equality Act 2010, employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments where a provision, criterion or practice puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage compared to non-disabled people. An automated recruitment process is, legally speaking, exactly that kind of provision.

An employer cannot outsource their statutory obligations to a third-party software provider. The volume problem is theirs to solve.

The foundational UK benchmark was set in Government Legal Service v Brookes [2017] IRLR 723. An applicant with Asperger's syndrome requested to submit short narrative answers rather than sit a mandatory, multiple-choice situational judgement test. The employer refused. The Employment Appeal Tribunal found that the rigid test format placed her at a substantial disadvantage and amounted to indirect disability discrimination. The employer's defence, that the test was a proportionate means of managing large applicant volumes, was rejected.

If an employer requires an applicant to use an automated video platform or a gamified test without offering an accessible alternative format, they are likely to be in breach of that duty. An employer cannot outsource their statutory obligations to a third-party software provider, and they cannot use the scale of their recruitment exercise as a justification for failing to make adjustments. The volume problem is theirs to solve, and the obligation runs before the recruitment process begins, not as an afterthought when a complaint arrives.

If you are operating in the live events space, you could do with running a disability risk assessment of your process to avoid these issues moving from academic to operational.

Where Do You Want to Be in Five Years' Time?

Employing more disabled people is the answer, I hope.

There are approximately 16 million disabled people in the UK with significant, collective spending power. They attend music festivals, sporting events, theatre performances, and live entertainment. They buy tickets, purchase hospitality packages, use accessible facilities, and bring companions and family members with them. They share their experiences, good and bad, extensively and vocally. For venues and promoters in the sport, music, entertainment, and live events sectors, a good experience for disabled customers is not just a legal obligation; it is a commercial one.

An event steward who is neurodivergent understands, without being briefed, what it feels like to navigate an unfamiliar venue under sensory pressure. A front-of-house team member who uses a wheelchair knows instinctively whether the accessible viewing platform is genuinely inclusive or has been positioned as an afterthought.

That kind of intelligence does not come from a training manual, a diversity policy, or a downloadable clip. It comes from the person doing the job. It produces better customer experiences rooted in a more personal understanding of access needs.

Organisations which have made active, strategic efforts to diversify their workforces, including recruiting people with a range of impairments, consistently report that their disabled employees identify problems that nobody else had noticed, propose solutions that work in practice rather than in theory, and build credibility with disabled customers that no communications campaign can replicate.

This is not charity. It is a competitive advantage which is lost every time an automated screening tool removes a candidate based on an algorithm.

Dealing with Rejection

A disabled applicant rejected in an AI-assisted online filtering process can claim compensation for discrimination, although it can be hard to prove.

Organisations that want to reduce their legal exposure and build genuinely effective workforces need to assess whether the software they are using is bias-free.

This is not as complicated as it might sound; it is about knowing the right questions to ask based on the right legal tests. In this case, it is about whether your screening tools constitute a provision, criterion or practice likely to disadvantage disabled applicants; ensuring alternative formats are proactively offered rather than available only on request; and considering whether AI-based processes are appropriate for roles where technical competency and personal qualities are what matter.

Talent is what it is because it is a quality which makes a person stand out from the norm. If recruitment in sport, music, entertainment, and live events continues to outsource its judgement to rigid mathematical models designed around a normalised population, it will not just create legal risk; it will systematically exclude some of the most capable, resilient, and commercially valuable people in the workforce. And it will do so in a sector where serving every customer well is not just a legal obligation; it's the whole point.