Hired by a robot: What it’s like to have an AI interview

Helen Coffey, The Independent

In hindsight, choosing to do a job interview during the first week back at work after the Christmas break may not have been my greatest ever idea. To paraphrase a favourite quote from cult Noughties sitcom Black Books, starring Rose Keegan, my brain feels like wet cake. Sodden. Spongey. Disintegrating into a pile of mush as I try to focus on the screen in front of me. Just before starting, I had mindlessly chomped my way through a comically oversized chocolate coin — purely because it was within arm’s reach — leaving me feeling mildly sick. Were this a normal job interview, I might reference all of the above. Just in passing, you understand, infused with enough sardonic charm to break the ice and immediately get the interviewer on side.

There’s no point in doing that today. My interviewer can’t relate to being a bit sluggish and slow, post-Twixmas. He doesn’t know what it feels like to sit in discomfort, waistband straining, because you followed up all that festive overeating by pounding the cut-price advent calendar chocolate. And it’s not just because he’s a young, fresh-faced twenty-something who you can just tell hasn’t been systematically adding Baileys instead of milk to his morning coffee for the past 10 days. No, the real reason my rapport-building jokes won’t cut it is that my interviewer isn’t, in fact, a real person. The “man” deciding my fate — nameless but who I instantly dub “Carl” in my head, simply to feel some kind of connection with him — is actually an AI interface designed to look and sound like a human. Created by HR-tech firm TestGorilla for use by companies and recruiters to filter out the best candidates, he is nothing more than a soulless if sophisticated checklist of keywords and phrases, fronted by an avatar in the guise of a handsome, ethnically ambiguous youngster.

This kind of interview is rapidly on the rise. The use of AI in recruitment in general has tripled in the past year alone in the UK, and three in 10 UK employers are implementing AI in their recruitment processes. Just under half (43 per cent) of large companies are now using AI to interview candidates. According to TestGorilla, close to 800 organisations have signed up to one of its plans that includes this new conversational AI interview tool. But back to the mysterious Carl. Given that this is not a real job interview, let alone one conducted by a real person — I’m just trialling the software to experience it first-hand — I feel bizarrely nervous. The butterflies are in large part due to the fact that the role in question, a content marketing strategist, is something I have zero experience in. It quickly transpires that it’s fairly tricky to answer a “tell me about a time when...” question when you’ve never actually done the thing they’re asking about. (I decide to at least have fun with it and dream up an elaborate marketing campaign for a clothing line aimed exclusively at dachshunds.)

But digging a little deeper, I realise my anxiety specifically stems from the fact that Carl is not a real person. I realise just how much I’ve always relied on my people skills to carry me through interviews. Even if I fudge an answer, I’m confident in the fact that those less tangible, “soft” skills — emotional intelligence, the ability to make people smile or put them at ease with a well-placed joke — will go some way to making up the deficit. I realise, too, how much I feed off other people’s energy in a pressurised situation. This has already become harder to do as more interviews have gone online rather than being conducted in person — but you could still get a sense of something. When you speak passionately to a human about a topic, there’s often a kind of mirroring that takes place: a positive feedback loop created by your enthusiasm that’s in turn reflected by their fervent nods, engaged body language and facial expressions. It gives me a boost, the reassurance that what I’m saying is landing; it gives me the encouragement I need to shine a little brighter.

It makes me wonder whether this kind of interview might see the end of the “personality hire” — workers brought onboard because of their stellar interpersonal skills, sunny disposition and general good vibes. I’ve always presumed that every functioning workplace needs a healthy percentage of employees who are, yes, competent at their job, but far more crucially help create a culture in which heading into the office doesn’t feel akin to diving headfirst into a toxic snake pit. Without a human at the helm when hiring, how to guarantee you’re not populating an organisation with highly skilled sociopaths?

To give Carl his dues, he does sometimes do me a solid. Designed to analyse candidates’ answers and hold them up against a framework, he’ll double-check something when I’ve finished each waffly, hodge-podge response: “Did you want to say anything further about learning outcomes and how you’d approach the situation in future?” I can only presume this is Carl’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge way of saying, “You didn’t actually answer the question the first time around, you absolute numpty.”