The AI will see you now

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AI is now conducting real-time job interviews. What could possibly go wrong?

COVERING THE ROLE of AI in hiring and job search is a bit like covering a low-stakes game of tennis. One side finds a little advantage that makes them more efficient for a while, until the other side finds a counter to that, to which the first side counters again, and around and around everyone goes.

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Nobody in the hiring equation is happy about the state of things, and we’ve written more than a few stories both about candidates frustrated with AI screening and hiring managers at their wit’s end with AI résumés and applications.

And yet, as if they know how to do nothing else, new AI wrenches are being thrown into the gears of hiring. Forget being annoyed that your interviewer is using AI ― jobseekers are now annoyed that their interviewer is AI.

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“Startups like Apriora, HeyMilo AI and Ribbon all say they’re seeing swift adoption of their software for conducting real-time AI interviews over video,” wrote Jo Constantz of the Financial Times. “A year ago, this idea seemed insane,” added Arsham Ghahramani, co-founder of Toronto-based Ribbon, an AI recruiting startup. “Now it’s quite normalized.”

Normalized? Perhaps. Annoying? Big yes, say some candidates.

“It was the most uncomfortable, fake positivity performance that I’ve had to give, because I wasn’t getting any feedback in real time,” said one jobseeker in a Slate article about the new world of AI interviews. In other cases, the AI interviewers go humorously haywire, with one getting stuck in a loop saying “vertical bar pilates” over and over again.

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But everything creates its own negation, and now people are creating AI tools that are built for “cheating” in live conversations. Cluely is the most famous one of these ― it was built to help candidates cheat their way through job interviews, although one reviewer noted that it hallucinated that she had working knowledge of the Malay language.

Even with the hiccups, though, the folks behind all this new tech believe it’s the future of candidate screening, likely to work best in technical assessments, and if used properly can save recruiters and hiring managers time. “We don’t believe that AI should be making the hiring decision,” startup founder Sabashan Ragavan told the Financial Times. “It should just collect data to support that decision.” Kieran Delamont