Arctic Shores

Company overview

Arctic Shores Limited (Companies House no. 08589048) was incorporated on 28 June 2013 and is registered at Lowry House, 17 Marble Street, Manchester. Its platform, branded "Una", replaces question-based psychometrics with interactive behavioural tasks: candidates are scored on what they do during the task rather than on what they say about themselves, producing a profile of what the company markets as "Skill-enablers" spanning personality, workplace intelligence and learning agility. The company reports use by over 350 organisations and publishes integrations with Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Teamtailor, Tribepad, Willo and Eploy alongside a standard API. Two positioning claims recur across the site: that the assessment is resistant to manipulation by generative AI, and that it is "never a black box". Note for the record: no product, module or feature named "Silhouette" could be located anywhere on arcticshores.com or in public sources, and that name should not be attributed to this vendor without further confirmation.

Regulatory exposure

As a provider of an AI-assisted candidate evaluation tool, Arctic Shores sits squarely in Annex III high-risk territory under the EU AI Act, with obligations landing from 2 August 2026, and it sells actively into European markets. Its strongest defensible position is architectural rather than documentary: the company consistently frames the product as decision-support that "never decides for you", which materially reduces (without eliminating) UK/EU GDPR Article 22 automated-decision exposure and supports a meaningful-human-oversight argument. Its weakest position is evidentiary. The company asserts on its science page that its assessment produces "no adverse impact, regardless of ethnicity or gender", and asserts on a product page that a task is "GDPR and EU AI Act compliant" — yet publishes no adverse-impact data, no independent bias audit, no technical documentation pack, no conformity-assessment reference, and no NYC Local Law 144 audit summary. Arctic Shores holds ISO 27001 but not ISO 42001, and its published compliance and security material is information-security-shaped, not AI-governance-shaped. US deployers in New York City, Illinois and Colorado would need to generate the required artefacts themselves, since the vendor supplies none of them publicly.

Path to a higher score

The single highest-value move is to publish an adverse-impact analysis — ideally an independent audit by a recognised auditor — carrying sample sizes, selection rates by race/ethnicity and sex, four-fifths-rule impact ratios and a dated scope statement. The unsupported "no adverse impact" claim is currently the widest gap between what Arctic Shores says and what it evidences, and closing it would move two rubric categories at once. Second, publish a technical documentation pack: a system/model card describing which behavioural signals are captured, how they are combined into scores, norm-group composition, validity and reliability coefficients and known limitations, plus Article 13-style instructions-for-use so deployers can meet their own obligations. Third, add explicit EU AI Act deployer guidance including an Article 27 FRIA template and a per-jurisdiction note covering NYC LL 144, Illinois and Colorado. Fourth — the cheapest fix and the lowest-scoring dimension — stand up a public post-market surface: a status page, a product/model changelog and a published vulnerability disclosure policy with a security contact. ISO 42001 certification would consolidate the first two and lift the technical-documentation and data-governance scores together.