AI-Powered Job Interviews Spark Controversy and Reshape Hiring Landscape

AI interview bots spark backlash from frustrated job applicants

The big picture: As more employers turn to AI to manage overburdened recruiting pipelines, the debate about its merits - and drawbacks - continues. Some job-seekers opt out of opportunities altogether when robots come calling. Others, resigned to the new normal, accept these digital gatekeepers to find work. Both sides, for now, seem likely to remain divided as the hiring process rapidly evolves. As employers increasingly automate their recruitment processes, job interviews themselves are undergoing a significant shift, with algorithms now mediating the familiar ritual of meeting a hiring manager. Instead of shaking hands with a recruiter, job-seekers are finding themselves answering questions posed by AI-driven bots that appear as digital avatars on screens. For many professionals, especially those navigating unemployment, this development brings a sting of frustration and alienation. Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer and editor who has spent months seeking new opportunities, compared the experience to an extra layer of demoralization. "Looking for a job right now is so demoralizing and soul-sucking, that to submit yourself to that added indignity is just a step too far," she told Fortune. Borchardt's first encounter with an AI interviewer left her unsettled, prompting her to abandon the process within minutes: "After about the third question, I was like, 'I'm done.' I just clicked exit. I'm not going to sit here for 30 minutes and talk to a machine... I don't want to work for a company if the HR person can't even spend the time to talk to me." Such reactions are not isolated. Candidates increasingly regard the absence of human interaction as a negative indicator of company culture, with some refusing to even participate in interviews when bots are involved. For Allen Rausch, a technical writer laid off after a long career, AI interviews were startlingly impersonal. Asked to relay his work history to a digital avatar that could not answer questions about the company, Rausch felt his time was being wasted. "Given the percentage of responses that I'm getting to just basic applications, I think a lot of AI interviews are wasting my time. I would probably want some sort of a guarantee that, 'Hey, we're doing this just to gather initial information, and we are going to interview you with a human being [later],'" he said. Despite the pushback, stretched HR teams have found compelling reasons for adopting artificial intelligence in the interview process. Many organizations now face overwhelming numbers of applicants for a single opening, with HR staff tasked with processing thousands of resumes and coordinating multiple stages of interviews. AI tools help filter applicants, schedule calls, and even conduct initial screening conversations, allowing human staff to focus time and energy on later rounds of interviews. "They're becoming more common in early-stage screening because they can streamline high-volume hiring," Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, explained. "But for high-volume hiring like customer service or retail or entry-level tech roles, we're just seeing this more and more... It's doing that first-stage work that a lot of employers need in order to be more efficient and save time." Not all candidates find the experience entirely negative. Some appreciate being able to schedule interviews at their convenience and are less daunted by speaking to a bot than to a human recruiter. Others raise concerns about the potential for AI to repeatedly ask irrelevant questions, misinterpret responses, or reinforce the feeling of being overlooked by a faceless process. As companies experiment with everything from cartoon avatars to faceless, more natural-sounding voices, reactions remain mixed. From the perspective of AI providers and some HR professionals, the criticism fails to recognize the realities of today's hiring landscape. Adam Jackson, CEO of Braintrust, a company providing AI interviewers, said the tools are now too integral to managing high applicant volumes to be abandoned. "The truth is, if you want a job, you're gonna go through this thing. If there were a large portion of the job-seeking community that were wholesale rejecting this, our clients wouldn't find the tool useful... This thing would be chronically underperforming for our clients. And we're just not seeing that - we're seeing the opposite," Jackson said. The technology, however, still has significant limitations. While AI may efficiently identify which applicants possess the requisite skills for a job, even its advocates concede that assessing cultural fit and building real human connections remains the domain of people. Jackson acknowledged, "AI is good at objective skill assessment - I would say even better than humans. But [when it comes to] cultural fit, I wouldn't even try to have AI do that."

When the Interviewer Isn't Human and No One Tells You

Lu wasn't sure if the candidate was using AI live during the interview, but suspects the candidate used AI beforehand to generate answers that they then memorized, and then when Lu's questions were out of the bounds of those responses, the interview broke down. Bidwell says that candidates reading from an AI-generated script for an interview "is hugely problematic" for companies. A solution, he proposes, could be to hold interviews in person. Lu's team at Kapwing had come across AI applications before that interview, and had set up multiple internal guardrails to weed out "bot" candidates or ones that rely too heavily on AI -- they go through applicants' online presence to make sure they're a real person, check their work experience to make sure they worked for real employers, and require live video calls for interviews. But he says that interview experience has raised even more questions for him about the hiring process. "What does our interview process look like in the age of AI? And how does that have to change?" he says. "I think there's a lot of questions there." Resume Now's report found that 79% of hiring professionals who were surveyed said that there should be some sort of regulation over the use of AI-generated content in job applications, indicating that while employers are increasingly using AI in the hiring process, they are also concerned about applicants using the technology. While that can feel "a little contradictory," Spencer says, he can understand "both sides of that coin." What is key, he continues, is that both employers and candidates use AI ethically -- in other words, to support or enhance their work, not replace it.

Job Seekers Disgusted When They Show Up to Job Interviews and the "Interviewer" Isn't Even Human

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."