The next time you get buttoned-up and sit down for a long-awaited job interview, you might not find a human on the other end of the call. Instead, job-hunters are now joining Zoom meetings only to be greeted by AI interviewers. Candidates tell Fortune they’re either confused, intrigued, or straight-up dejected when the robotic, faceless bots join the calls.
“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,” Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer and editor who has been on the job-hunt for three months, tells Fortune. “Within minutes, I was like, ‘I don’t like this. This is awful.’ It started out normal…Then it went into the actual process of the interview, and that’s when it got a little weird.”
AI interviewers are only the newest change to the hiring process that has been upended by the advanced technology. With HR teams dwindling and hiring managers tasked to review thousands of applicants for a single role, they’re optimizing their jobs by using AI to filter top applicants, schedule candidate interviews, and automate correspondence about next steps in the process. AI interviewers may be a god-send for middle-managers, but job-seekers see them as only another hurdle in the intense hunt for work.
The experience for some job-hunters has been so poor that they’re swearing off interviews conducted by AI altogether. Candidates tell Fortune that AI interviewers make them feel unappreciated to the point where they’d rather skip out on potential job opportunities, reasoning the company’s culture can’t be great if human bosses won’t make the time to interview them. But HR experts argue the opposite; since AI interviewers can help hiring managers save time in first-round calls, the humans have more time to have more meaningful conversations with applicants down the line.
Job-seekers and HR are starkly divided on how they feel about the tech, but one thing is fact—AI interviewers aren’t going anywhere.
“The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune. “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.”
Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers
Social media has been exploding with job-seekers detailing their AI interviewer experiences: describing bots hallucinating and repeating questions on end, calling the robotic conversations awkward, or saying it’s less nerve-wracking than talking to a human. Despite how much hiring managers love AI interviewers, job-seekers aren’t sold on the idea just yet.
Allen Rausch, a 56-year-old technical writer who has worked at Amazon and Electronic Arts, has been on the job hunt for two months since getting laid off from his previous role at InvestCloud. In looking for new opportunities, he was “startled” to run into AI interviewers for the first time—let alone on three occasions for separate jobs. All of the meetings would last up to 25 minutes, and featured woman-like cartoons with female voices. It asked basic career questions, running through his resume and details about the job opening, but couldn’t answer any of his questions on the company or culture.
Rausch says he’s only open to doing more AI interviews if they don’t test his writing skills, and if human connection is guaranteed at some point later in the process.
“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 tells Fortune. “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].’”
While Rausch withstood multiple AI interviews, Borchardt couldn’t even sit through a single one. The 64-year-old editorial professional says things went downhill when the robotic interviewer simply ran through her resume, asking her to repeat all of her work experiences at each company listed. The call was impersonal, irritating, and to Borchardt, quite lazy. She ended the interview in less than 10 minutes.
“After about the third question, I was like, ‘I’m done.’ I just clicked exit,” she says. “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.”
Alex Cobb, a professional now working at U.K. energy company Murphy Group, also encountered an AI interviewer several months ago searching for a new role. While he’s sympathetic towards how many applications HR has to sift through, he finds AI interviewers to be “weird” and ultimately ineffective in fully assessing human applicants. The experience put a bad taste in his mouth, to the point where Cobb won’t pursue any AI-proctored interviews in the foreseeable future.
“If I know from looking at company reviews or the hiring process that I will be using AI interviewing, I will just not waste my time, because I feel like it’s a cost-saving exercise more than anything,” Cobb tells Fortune. “It makes me feel like they don’t value my learning and development. It makes me question the culture of the company—are they going to cut jobs in the future because they’ve learned robots can already recruit people? What else will they outsource that to do?”
AI interviewers are a god-send for squeezed hiring managers
While many job-seekers are backing away from taking AI interviews, hiring managers are accepting the technology with open arms. A large part of it comes from necessity.
“They’re becoming more common in early-stage screening because they can streamline high-volume hiring,” Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, tells Fortune. “You’re seeing them all over. 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.”
It should be noted that not all AI interviewers are created equal—there’s a wide range of AI interviewers entering the market. Job-seekers who spoke with Fortune described monotonous, robotic-voiced bots with pictures of strange feminized avatars. But some AI interviewers, like the one created by Braintrust, distribute a faceless bot with a more natural sounding voice. Its CEO says applicants using the tech are overall happy with their experience—and its hiring manager clientele are enthusiastic, too.
However, Jackson admits AI interviewers still have their limitations, despite how revolutionary they are for HR teams.
“It does 100 interviews, and it’s going to hand back the best 10 to the hiring manager, and then the human takes over,” he says. “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.”