Interviewing with AI
AI has fundamentally broken the interviewing process, creating an arms race where both sides automate away the human connection that makes hiring decisions meaningful.
It is safe to say that AI has almost entirely ruined the interviewing process. This is especially true with software engineering, but I think the tooling is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous. This is essentially an arms race by both sides to try and automate every step of the process so that they can handle volume. Part of this means that many companies are now having candidates interview directly with an AI before I get any human interaction.
I applied for a role on LinkedIn earlier this week, and immediately got a phone call. The voice sounded perfectly human but it was introducing itself as an AI recruiter that was looking to gather more information about my skills.
Now I'm not one to be super trusting of recruiters, but I find that the AI didn't do a terrible job. Most intro calls with recruiters are basically repeating your resume and the forms you just filled out, then they pass that info onto a hiring manager. Sounds like exactly the type of automation that AI enables.
This conversation was a bit deeper though, and went on for 10 minutes. The AI was very conversational and high quality, and surpisingly it would cut me off when I said a key word that it was interested in. This does feel like a tech demo feature that shouldn't have been in this call, for an interview I think it would be better to let me finish my story about a project instead of abruptly cutting me off to ask about how I've use pandas. The AI should be really good at having good follow up questions queued up, so there is no need to interject.
A less impressive example, but I've also had both application and post application "interviews" with a chat bot that could have just been a form. It probably cost just as much to have the model scrape my resume into structured json as it is to try to chat with me about it in a overly conversational customer support type way. Or they could just use the information from the form I just filled out to send in an application.
Impact
Making me invest any time in your company before I get to talk to a human is incredibly rude. While job searching you have to be talking to multiple companies at a time and if you don't have a human in the loop with me you are by far my lowest priority. I recently let an assessment exam lapse with a really big tech company that I would love to work for, but why would I spend 2 hours on a AI proctored coding interview before I know that a hiring manager at least likes my experience? As a hiring manager would you value feedback from an AI interview with an applicant?
There are a few jobs that I feel will never be automated. Ones where a human interaction is essential. When I sit down at a restaurant, I don't want a tablet on my table for ordering. When I go to urgent care I don't want to explain my issue to an AI. Hiring is a huge investment on both ends and I think these tools are going to have massive negative effects on companies that force an AI filter, or leave important nuaced decisions to models.