Employers are blindsiding candidates with AI interviews—and scaring them off

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has penetrated every aspect of the hiring process—even the elements that should necessitate a human touch, like conducting interviews. The vast majority of companies already rely on AI to sift through applications and resumes, but many of them are now also using it for screening calls and initial interviews. 

The AI interview has grown so ubiquitous, in fact, that a new report from the hiring platform Greenhouse found that nearly two-thirds of job seekers have been interviewed by AI during the hiring process—an increase of 13 percentage points from just six months ago. But that doesn’t mean they are happy about it. 

In a Greenhouse survey of almost 1,200 job seekers across the U.S., 38% said they had dropped out of a hiring process that involved being interviewed by AI, while another 12% said they would do so if presented with an AI interview. That’s quite notable when workers are faced with a low-hire, low-fire job market, which has kept unemployment low while also making it difficult to find new jobs—especially as companies continue cutting jobs over AI. 

It’s not that workers are surprised that they might encounter AI during the hiring process. After all, job seekers now regularly use AI to spruce up their resumes and apply to jobs en masse, forcing employers to wade through a glut of applications—some of which hiring managers argue can misrepresent or overstate workers’ qualifications. 

But workers do expect transparency when AI is part of the hiring process: As the Greenhouse survey reveals, many employers are not transparent about the extent to which AI might be used. Most of the workers surveyed—about 70%—said they were not informed that the hiring process would entail being interviewed and assessed by AI, and about a fifth of them only discovered that was the case when they started the interview. 

Job seekers were most troubled by companies not disclosing that AI would evaluate them based on pre-recorded video interviews, which led a third of respondents to take themselves out of the running for a job; over a quarter of them dropped out of the hiring process because they took issue with AI monitoring or found that employers were not upfront about the role AI would play. Perhaps most telling is that about 20% of people surveyed walked away from a job because they weren’t sure if they were interacting with a human or AI.

As for whether AI might improve on the traditional interview or reduce bias, like some experts have argued: Most people surveyed found that there was little difference. Over a third of respondents said they experienced ageism during interviews with both humans and AI, while more than a quarter felt they encountered bias on the basis of race or ethnicity. When job seekers did AI interviews, only 28% moved on to the next stage of the hiring process; over half of them did not hear back and just 13% were explicitly rejected. 

Despite their grievances, most workers don’t expect employers to entirely remove AI from the hiring process. While 19% of respondents said they wanted less AI, the vast majority of them simply demanded more transparency—namely, clarity on how AI was being used and the option to conduct an interview with a human. They also wanted more human oversight to ensure that AI was not solely responsible for making decisions about an applicant. 

In fact, there were some workers, 38% of them, who actually felt more positively about the company after an AI interview. Some research suggests that certain workers might actually prefer AI interviews, in part because they are more consistent and easier to schedule. On the other hand, 34% of people surveyed by
Greenhouse said an AI interview left them with a negative impression of the employer, and over half believed that human interviewers would be more fair. 

In other words: Employers can’t just turn to AI to simplify their hiring process—not without laying the groundwork for prospective hires to trust that process.

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