The big picture: As more employers turn to AI to manage overburdened recruiting pipelines, the debate about its merits – and drawbacks – continues. Some job-seekers opt out of opportunities altogether when robots come calling. Others, resigned to the new normal, accept these digital gatekeepers to find work. Both sides, for now, seem likely to remain divided as the hiring process rapidly evolves.
As employers increasingly automate their recruitment processes, job interviews themselves are undergoing a significant shift, with algorithms now mediating the familiar ritual of meeting a hiring manager. Instead of shaking hands with a recruiter, job-seekers are finding themselves answering questions posed by AI-driven bots that appear as digital avatars on screens.
For many professionals, especially those navigating unemployment, this development brings a sting of frustration and alienation. Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer and editor who has spent months seeking new opportunities, compared the experience to an extra layer of demoralization. "Looking for a job right now is so demoralizing and soul-sucking, that to submit yourself to that added indignity is just a step too far," she told Fortune.
Borchardt's first encounter with an AI interviewer left her unsettled, prompting her to abandon the process within minutes: "After about the third question, I was like, 'I'm done.' I just clicked exit. I'm not going to sit here for 30 minutes and talk to a machine… I don't want to work for a company if the HR person can't even spend the time to talk to me."
What role will AI play in the future of hiring? Adam Jackson, CEO of @usebraintrust, shares his insights on how AI-powered talent networks create new opportunities for both companies and candidates. https://t.co/9AktCNAtNO pic.twitter.com/MtV9igQoFE
– SHRM (@SHRM) October 23, 2024
Such reactions are not isolated. Candidates increasingly regard the absence of human interaction as a negative indicator of company culture, with some refusing to even participate in interviews when bots are involved. For Allen Rausch, a technical writer laid off after a long career, AI interviews were startlingly impersonal. Asked to relay his work history to a digital avatar that could not answer questions about the company, Rausch felt his time was being wasted. "Given the percentage of responses that I'm getting to just basic applications, I think a lot of AI interviews are wasting my time. I would probably want some sort of a guarantee that, 'Hey, we're doing this just to gather initial information, and we are going to interview you with a human being [later],'" he said.
Despite the pushback, stretched HR teams have found compelling reasons for adopting artificial intelligence in the interview process. Many organizations now face overwhelming numbers of applicants for a single opening, with HR staff tasked with processing thousands of resumes and coordinating multiple stages of interviews. AI tools help filter applicants, schedule calls, and even conduct initial screening conversations, allowing human staff to focus time and energy on later rounds of interviews.
"They're becoming more common in early-stage screening because they can streamline high-volume hiring," Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, explained. "But for high-volume hiring like customer service or retail or entry-level tech roles, we're just seeing this more and more… It's doing that first-stage work that a lot of employers need in order to be more efficient and save time."
Not all candidates find the experience entirely negative. Some appreciate being able to schedule interviews at their convenience and are less daunted by speaking to a bot than to a human recruiter. Others raise concerns about the potential for AI to repeatedly ask irrelevant questions, misinterpret responses, or reinforce the feeling of being overlooked by a faceless process. As companies experiment with everything from cartoon avatars to faceless, more natural-sounding voices, reactions remain mixed.
From the perspective of AI providers and some HR professionals, the criticism fails to recognize the realities of today's hiring landscape. Adam Jackson, CEO of Braintrust, a company providing AI interviewers, said the tools are now too integral to managing high applicant volumes to be abandoned. "The truth is, if you want a job, you're gonna go through this thing. If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn't find the tool useful… This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we're just not seeing that – we're seeing the opposite," Jackson said.
The technology, however, still has significant limitations. While AI may efficiently identify which applicants possess the requisite skills for a job, even its advocates concede that assessing cultural fit and building real human connections remains the domain of people. Jackson acknowledged, "AI is good at objective skill assessment – I would say even better than humans. But [when it comes to] cultural fit, I wouldn't even try to have AI do that."
AI interview bots spark backlash from frustrated job applicants
