Lancaster start-up wins funding to help businesses hire the right staff
A Lancaster start-up has won key funding aimed at help tech businesses across the North West.
JobFair, launched in Lancaster just months before its co-founder went on maternity leave, has secured Innovate UK cash which will be used to write fairer job adverts and widen who applies.
With a baby on the way, Dr Alice Ashcroft launched JobFair two years ago and a fairly clear sense that the timing was terrible.
The platform analyses job descriptions for exclusionary and gendered language.
A few months after it went live, she was on maternity leave but JobFair progressed nevertheless and now works with businesses across the North West – with fresh funding through Innovate UK's TechLocal programme to take it further.
The project, JobFair NW, runs until March 2027 and is led by Digital Heard, Alice's Lancaster-based company, in partnership with social enterprise Cybermoor Services Ltd and AI specialist Sqwosh.
Tech SMEs across the region can take a three-month trial of JobFair through the project.
"I didn't plan to launch a business and then disappear for most of its first year," said Alice, co-founder of JobFair.
"But that's what happened, and it turned out to be a decent test.
"If the product only worked while I was in the room pushing it, it wasn't much of a product. It kept going, people kept using it, and now we've got the backing to put it in front of businesses who are trying to hire and keep hitting the same wall."
That wall is familiar to most small tech firms. A job advert goes out, the applications come back looking much like the existing team, and nobody is quite sure why.
JobFair reads the advert before it's posted, flags the words and phrasing that quietly put people off applying, and suggests alternatives.
Research consistently shows that women are less likely to apply for roles described in stereotypically masculine terms, even when they're fully qualified.
Alice's PhD at Lancaster University examined gendered language and technology. Her book on the subject, Unspoken, is published by Hachette in February 2027.
JobFair was built with co-founder Josh Bailey, director of Sqwosh, as an agentic AI system that learns as it goes, with people reviewing its work along the way.
"There's a fair amount of worry about AI making hiring less fair, and some of it is justified," said Josh.
"We've gone the other way. JobFair uses AI to catch the bias that's already sitting in a job advert, the stuff people write without noticing, and it gets better at that the more it sees.
"The aim was never to take the person out of hiring. It's to give the person writing the advert a second pair of eyes that's read an awful lot of job adverts."
The project brings together a Lancaster start-up, a social enterprise and a specialist AI firm, and that mix is deliberate.
"No single organisation builds a regional tech ecosystem on its own," said Daniel Heery of Cybermoor, a social enterprise which works across the North West.
"It happens when enterprises of different shapes and sizes work together and share what they know.
"JobFair NW is a good example of that – a local start-up with a strong product, a social enterprise with a track record of working with disruptive technologies, and specialist AI expertise, all pointed at the same problem.
"Fairer hiring helps every business in the North West, and it's the kind of thing that only works if we do it together."
North West tech businesses interested in a three-month JobFair trial can find out more at job-fair.uk.