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The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’

When Ty landed an introductory phone interview with a finance and banking company last month, they assumed it would be a quick chat with a recruiter. And when they got on the phone, Ty assumed the recruiter, who introduced herself as Jaime, was human. But things got robotic.

“The voice sounded similar to Siri,” said Ty, who is 29 and lives in the DC metro area. “It was creepy.”

Ty realized they weren’t speaking to a living, breathing person. Their interviewer was an AI system, and one with a rather rude habit. Jaime asked Ty all the right questions – what’s your management style? are you a good fit for this role? – but she wouldn’t let Ty fully answer them.

“After cutting me off, the AI would respond, ‘Great! Sounds good! Perfect!’ and move on to the next question,” Ty said. “After the third or fourth question, the AI just stopped after a short pause and told me that the interview was completed and someone from the team would reach out later.” (Ty asked that their last name not be used because their current employer doesn’t know they’re looking for a job.)

A survey from Resume Builder released last summer found that by 2024, four in 10 companies would use AI to “talk with” candidates in interviews. Of those companies, 15% said hiring decisions would be made with no input from a human at all.

26 comments

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    “After the third or fourth question, the AI just stopped after a short pause and told me that the interview was completed and someone from the team would reach out later.” (Ty asked that their last name not be used because their current employer doesn’t know they’re looking for a job.)

    “I’m hearing that employers are now discounting a lot of the information they receive that’s in written form, and want to get to a face-to-face conversation as quickly as possible with the candidates so they can properly vet them,” she explained.

    Michael G is the founder of Final Round AI, an “interview co-pilot” that listens to recruiters’ questions and prompts personalized answers in real time, based on the résumé and cover letter uploaded by the interviewee.

    You don’t need to be a wildly imaginative person to consider how that might affect job-seekers – Amazon reportedly scrapped an in-house hiring algorithm, trained on data submitted by applicants, that favored men and penalized résumés that included the word “women”.

    “The current wave of AI uses algorithms that are probabilistic models, which means they simply rely on patterns in past data to make likely predictions,” said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    Pollak said that to avoid such bias, ZipRecruiter strips “any kind of identifiable information” like names and zip codes from résumés before putting them through an AI system.

    The original article contains 1,813 words, the summary contains 234 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

26 comments