The next time you get buttoned-up and sit down for a long-awaited job interview, you might not find a human on the other end of the call. Instead, job-hunters are now joining Zoom meetings only to be greeted by AI interviewers. Candidates tell Fortune they’re either confused, intrigued, or straight-up dejected when the robotic, faceless bots join the calls.
“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,” Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer and editor who has been on the job-hunt for three months, tells Fortune. “Within minutes, I was like, ‘I don’t like this. This is awful.’ It started out normal…Then it went into the actual process of the interview, and that’s when it got a little weird.”
AI interviewers are only the newest change to the hiring process that has been upended by the advanced technology. With HR teams dwindling and hiring managers tasked to review thousands of applicants for a single role, they’re optimizing their jobs by using AI to filter top applicants, schedule candidate interviews, and automate correspondence about next steps in the process. AI interviewers may be a god-send for middle-managers, but job-seekers see them as only another hurdle in the intense hunt for work.
The experience for some job-hunters has been so poor that they’re swearing off interviews conducted by AI altogether. Candidates tell Fortune that AI interviewers make them feel unappreciated to the point where they’d rather skip out on potential job opportunities, reasoning the company’s culture can’t be great if human bosses won’t make the time to interview them. But HR experts argue the opposite; since AI interviewers can help hiring managers save time in first-round calls, the humans have more time to have more meaningful conversations with applicants down the line.
Job-seekers and HR are starkly divided on how they feel about the tech, but one thing is fact—AI interviewers aren’t going anywhere.
“The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “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.”
Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers
Social media has been exploding with job-seekers detailing their AI interviewer experiences: describing bots hallucinating and repeating questions on end, calling the robotic conversations awkward, or saying it’s less nerve-wracking than talking to a human. Despite how much hiring managers love AI interviewers, job-seekers aren’t sold on the idea just yet.
Allen Rausch, a 56-year-old technical writer who has worked at Amazon and Electronic Arts, has been on the job hunt for two months since getting laid off from his previous role at InvestCloud. In looking for new opportunities, he was “startled” to run into AI interviewers for the first time—let alone on three occasions for separate jobs. All of the meetings would last up to 25 minutes, and featured woman-like cartoons with female voices. It asked basic career questions, running through his resume and details about the job opening, but couldn’t answer any of his questions on the company or culture.
Rausch says he’s only open to doing more AI interviews if they don’t test his writing skills, and if human connection is guaranteed at some point later in the process.
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