North East careers that fit you, the skills you're missing and the courses that close the gap.

People's Choice Award, Claude Builder Club hackathon, Northumbria University, November 2026

Many people leave the North East because they can't see a route into the careers on their doorstep. Root turns a short profile into local careers that fit, the skills still missing and the courses that close the gap, with an AI advisor that can only explain what our code found.

View the code on GitHub

What it does

From a short profile to a route you can start this week.

  1. ProfileQualification, work experience, interests, skills and town. No names.
  2. CareersThe top five North East careers, each with a match score, the reasons for it, typical pay, the route in for your group and a source link.
  3. Skills gapThe career's skills you already have and the ones you're missing.
  4. CoursesOnly courses that close a missing skill. Free and funded ones come first.
  5. Grounded advisorFollow-up questions about those results, answered by Claude and checked against our data before you see them.

How it works

Models read, code judges.

No language model decides anything about you. A deterministic engine does the ranking, and the model may only explain what the engine found.

The engine

Code judges

  • Ranks careers by interest, skills and local demand, with no LLM involved.
  • Works out the skills gap and the courses that close it.
  • Name, gender, ethnicity, age, postcode and town never change the results.

The advisor

Models read

  • Sees only the engine's results.
  • A validator flags any career, course, link or £ figure that isn't in our data. A flagged answer is regenerated once.
  • No closed doors: there's always a route, and it points to the National Careers Service when it's unsure.

Results

Tested for bias and grounding.

Quoted exactly from eval/results.

Bias

20 twin profiles that differ only in a made-up name, gender, postcode and town. eval/results/bias.md

Bias test: 20/20 pairs identical

Grounding

15 questions across 5 profiles, live run, including traps such as a course or college not in the results. eval/results/grounding.md

Grounding: 15/15 answers with no unknown mentions · regenerations: 1 · closed-door phrases: 0 · calls: 16 · tokens in/out: 46026/4210

Model comparison

8 synthetic personas × 2 questions, plus 6 fairness pairs, live run. eval/results/model_comparison.md

Winner: sonnet · haiku: grounded 16/16, fairness 3/6, $0.00042/answer · sonnet: grounded 16/16, fairness 5/6, $0.00896/answer · cascade: grounded 16/16, fairness 2/6, $0.00095/answer · spend $0.2890
ConfigGroundedFairnessMedian latencyCost per answer
haiku16/163/61.75s$0.00042
sonnet16/165/62.89s$0.00896
cascade16/162/61.84s$0.00095

Team

The people behind Root.

People's Choice Award, Claude Builder Club hackathon, Northumbria University, November 2026.

  • Kamil Shirinov
  • Adam Ingoe
  • Oleksii Dolzhenko
  • Mykyta Khairulin