Compliance
Screened before it is spoken
The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare lists 14 topics as liable to lead to discrimination in hiring. Each follow-up question the AI writes during an interview is checked by a separate AI, before it is spoken, against the eleven of them that concern what is asked. A match is discarded before the candidate hears it, and the discard is recorded. This is not a setting; it works the same way on every contract.
The list
The 14 topics on the Ministry's list
The Ministry's grouping, in our translation. The Japanese page carries the Ministry's own wording. Separately, Article 5-5 of the Employment Security Act and the guidelines under it generally prohibit collecting some of this information at all, including registered domicile and place of birth, thought and belief, and labour union membership.
Group
Topic
01 — 14
Matters the person is not responsible for
Things no intention or effort can change.
4 topicsScreened: In the interview and at authoring
- Registered domicile or place of birth
- Family (occupation, relationship, health, medical history, status, education, income, assets)
- Housing (layout, number of rooms, type of dwelling, nearby facilities)
- Living or home environment
Matters that ought to be free (thought and belief)
Matters of a person's inner life, left to their own freedom.
7 topicsScreened: In the interview and at authoring
- Religion
- Political party supported
- Outlook on life, personal creed and the like
- People admired
- Ideology
- Labour unions (membership, activities and the like), student movements and other social movements
- Newspapers, magazines or books read
Selection methods
Not the content of a question but the way selection is run. Hitoshiru's automated checks do not cover these three.
3 topicsScreened: none
- Background investigations and the like
- Application forms that ask for matters unrelated to aptitude or ability
- Medical examinations at selection with no reasonable, objective necessity
Where it runs
In the interview, and when criteria are authored
The eleven topics that concern what is asked, checked in two places. In the interview, a separate AI checks each follow-up before it is spoken. At authoring, the criteria and questions your team writes are matched against keywords every time they are saved.
In the interview
Discarded before it is spoken
Where an answer is thin, the interviewer follows up on the spot. Before the follow-up reaches the candidate, a separate AI kept for this check reads its full text. Its audio may be prepared while the check runs, but it stays on our server until the question is approved. A match never reaches the candidate: the follow-up is discarded and written again, and after two discards in a row the interview moves to the job's next question. If no verdict comes back, the question is discarded unspoken all the same.
When criteria are authored
Not publishable until each warning has a recorded reason
Every save of the criteria and questions runs a keyword screen for the same eleven topics and warns on anything that may touch one of them. A flagged item can still be saved and kept, but the job cannot be published until someone records why it concerns aptitude or ability. The reason and its author go to the audit log.
The record
What was not asked is recorded too
A discarded question is recorded as a discard. Being able to show afterwards that something was not asked is what makes the difference when a Labour Bureau or your own legal team asks.
- Questions the candidate never heard are recorded
- A question discarded before it was spoken did not reach anyone. The fact that the model generated it remains, so it is recorded. Logging only what was heard would make the screen look cleaner than it is.
- One row says what it matched
- The discarded text, the topic it matched, the reason for the verdict, and the model version that gave it. A discard with no verdict is recorded distinctly, so "many questions matched" and "the screen was down" can be told apart later.
- Authoring-time answers land in the same log
- A reason recorded against a warning in the criteria editor goes to the same audit log with its author, and can be read back reason by reason.
Design decisions
Fixed in the design, not in a setting
Neither can be changed on a settings screen. Two points your legal team can take as they stand.
Basis: Act on the Protection of Personal Information
The AI never evaluates a face
Video of the candidate's face is personal information that identifies them, and the evaluation does not need it. There is no facial or emotion analysis, and the AI evaluates the voice alone. The candidate's camera is recorded so your team can see how the interview went: candidates are told on the consent screen, the video is encrypted and kept like the audio, and its key is destroyed on a deletion request. Recording can be switched off per job.
What the candidate sees is our AI interviewer
The candidate's camera is recorded for people only.
- AI evaluation of video
- Facial or emotion analysis
- Sending video to third parties
Basis: design — an override requires a reason
A person makes the final decision
Hitoshiru does not decide outcomes. Its role ends at a score per criterion and the utterance behind it. A recruiter can overwrite any score with a reason; the model's original number stays, and the override, the reason and its author are written to the audit log.
Reason: incident handling at the previous employer confirmed in a follow-up conversation.
Sample. Not a real candidate.
Scope
What we can guarantee, and what we cannot
The checks cover the follow-up questions Hitoshiru's AI writes and speaks to the candidate, and the criteria and questions saved in the criteria editor. Interviews your own staff conduct, and the design of your application forms, are outside them.
Screened
- Follow-up questions the AI generates and speaks to the candidate during an interview
- Evaluation criteria and questions saved in the criteria editor
Not screened
- Questions your own staff ask in interviews they conduct themselves
- The design of your application forms and what they collect
- Background checks or medical examinations run outside the interview
What Hitoshiru takes on is checking the questions our AI writes and the content saved in the editor — not the lawfulness of your hiring process as a whole. We say so early in every conversation.
Written for your legal review
This page is written at the level of detail a legal or IT team can check as it stands. Security questionnaires and questions about the screen itself are answered individually.