Credit: Reuters File Photo
When Jennifer Dunn, 54, landed an interview last month through a recruiting firm for a vice president of marketing job, she looked forward to talking to someone about the role and learning more about the
potential employer.
Instead, a virtual artificial intelligence recruiter named Alex sent her a text message to schedule the interview. And when Dunn got on the phone at the appointed time for the meeting, Alex was waiting
to talk to her.
“Are you a human?” Dunn asked.
“No, I’m not a human,” Alex replied. “But I’m here to make the interview process smoother.”
For the next 20 minutes, Dunn, a marketing professional in San Antonio, answered Alex’s questions about her qualifications — though Alex could not answer most of her questions about the job. Even though Alex had a friendly tone, the conversation “felt hollow,” Dunn said. In the end, she hung up before finishing the interview.
You might have thought AI was coming for your job. First it’s coming for your job interviewer.
Job seekers across the country are starting to encounter faceless voices and avatars backed by AI in their interviews. These autonomous interviewers are part of a wave of artificial intelligence known as “agentic AI,” where AI agents are directed to act on their own to generate real-time conversations and build on responses.
Some aspects of job searches — such as screening resumes and scheduling meetings — have become increasingly automated over time, but the interview had long seemed to be the part of the process that most needed a human touch. Now AI is encroaching upon even that domain, making the often frustrating and ego-busting task of finding a job even more impersonal.
Talking to AI interviewers has “felt very dehumanising,” said Charles Whitley, 22, a recent computer science and mathematics graduate from Santa Clara University who has had two such conversations in the past seven months.
In one interview, for a software engineering job, he said, the AI voice tried to seem more human by adding “ums” and “uhs.” It came across as “some horror-movie-type stuff,” Whitley said.
Autonomous AI interviewers started taking off last year, according to job hunters, tech companies and recruiters. The trend has partly been driven by tech startups like Ribbon AI, Talently and Apriora, which have developed robot interviewers to help employers talk to more candidates and reduce the load on human recruiters — especially as AI tools have enabled job seekers to generate resumes and cover letters and apply to tons of openings with a few clicks.
AI can personalise a job candidate’s interview, said Arsham Ghahramani, the CEO and a co-founder of Ribbon AI. His company’s AI interviewer, which has a customisable voice and appears on a video call as moving audio waves, asks questions specific to the role to be filled, and builds on information provided by the job seeker, he said.
“It’s really paradoxical, but in a lot of ways, this is a much more humanising experience because we’re asking questions that are really tailored to you,” Ghahramani said.
Propel Impact, a nonprofit in Vancouver, British Columbia, that teaches young people about financial investing, began using Ribbon AI’s interviewer in January. That allowed the organisation to screen 500 applicants for a fellowship program it offers, far more than the 150 applicants who were interviewed by people last year, said Cheralyn Chok, Propel Impact’s executive director.
“There’s no way we would have been able to successfully recruit and set up offers to 300 people to join our programme,” she said.
Chok said the AI interviews also saved applicants the hassle of doing multiple interviews with outside financial firms to determine their fellowship placements. Instead, Propel Impact sent the recorded AI interviews to those companies.
And there was still a human element, she said, since the organisation told applicants that they could ask her team questions at any point.
Humans cannot ultimately be taken out of the hiring process, said Sam DeMase, a career expert at ZipRecruiter, an online job board. People still need to make the hiring decisions, she said, because AI may contain bias and cannot be trusted to fully evaluate a candidate’s experience, skills and fitness for a job.
At the same time, more people should expect AI-run interviews, DeMase said. “Organisations are trying to become more efficient and trying to scale faster, and as a result, they’re looking to AI,” she said.
Dunn has had about nine job interviews over the past two months, she said. Only one was with an AI like Alex, she said, for which she was “grateful.” Given the choice, she never wants to interview with AI again.
“It isn’t something that feels real to me,” she said.