Responsible Use of Automated Matching

Loop calculates a compatibility score between a participant and a vacancy using five practical factors: pay, distance, availability, flexibility and sociability. It helps people and staff see which opportunities are most likely to work in real life, so placements are more likely to last.

• It does not decide whether anyone is offered a job, a place on a programme or any service. People make those decisions.
• It does not use protected characteristics, such as age, disability, sex, race, religion or sexual orientation, as matching factors. Date of birth is not used in matching.
• It does not replace the judgement of Participant Support staff, Employer Management staff or employers.

In council and programme use, staff can see the reasons behind a match so they can check it and apply their own judgement.

We are setting up regular reviews of how matching performs across groups, and will describe the process here.

You can ask us, or the organisation that gave you access to Loop, how your profile was matched, ask for a person to review any decision that affected you, and challenge the outcome. Contact [email protected].

Data we process for a council or programme is used only to deliver that service. It is not used to train artificial intelligence models. Where an organisation turns on our optional artificial intelligence support, it runs in the United Kingdom with model training turned off.