Employment seekers are getting frustrated when they finally lock down a much-sought-after job interview — only to realize when they log onto the meeting that the “interviewers” isn’t even human.
As Fortune reports, professionals are starting to push back, noping out of interviews conducted by AI and reasoning that the company culture can’t be very good if actual leadership isn’t willing to take the time to meet candidates face-to-face.
However, the people behind the AI interviewer tech say that it’s simply part of the future, so it’s time to get used to it, whether you like it or not.
“If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn’t find the tool useful,” AI interview software distributor Braintrust CEO Adam Jackson told Fortune. “This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we’re just not seeing that — we’re seeing the opposite.”
It’s a dystopian vision of a future in which human connection is progressively replaced by AI. As executives continue to laud the tech and boast about using it to lay off workers, even finding the few jobs that remain has become an excruciating stress test, revealing employers’ true motivations and priorities.
AI hasn’t just deteriorated the interview process; it has allowed both accredited applicants and scammers alike to spam employers with applications and résumés, which are often uniquely customized to the job’s details. The result is overwhelmed HR workers, who then use AI to sift through thousands of applications, closing the circle.
“It’s an ‘applicant tsunami’ that’s just going to get bigger,” one recruiter told the New York Times earlier this year, which can devolve into an “AI versus AI type of situation.”
One job hunter, technical writer Allen Rausch, told Fortune that he’s only willing to be interviewed by an AI if the company guarantees that he’ll eventually talk to a human.
“Given the percentage of responses that I’m getting to just basic applications, I think a lot of AI interviews are wasting my time,” he told Fortune.
Another job seeker, writer and editor Debra Borchardt, added that she simply “clicked exit.”
“I’m not going to sit here for 30 minutes and talk to a machine,” she said. “I don’t want to work for a company if the HR person can’t even spend the time to talk to me.”
Adding insult to injury, we’ve seen instances of AI interviewers melting down in a deranged spiral, highlighting glaring technical issues.
But to proponents of the tech, it’s a new reality job seekers will have to put up with no matter what. To them, it’s a way to free up time for overworked hiring managers, especially when it comes to high-volume hiring for areas like customer service.
However, chances are humans will still play a role, at least in some way.
“AI is good at objective skill assessment — I would say even better than humans,” Jackson told Fortune. “But [when it comes to] cultural fit, I wouldn’t even try to have AI do that.”
More on AI interviews: Applying to Jobs Has Become an AI-Powered Wasteland
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