AI interviews can streamline the job-seeking process, but they also raise ethical concerns.
There’s also a lot of experimentation, meaning AI interviews can glitch, as one TikToker found.
An AI communication and etiquette expert shares advice on how to prepare for a meeting with an AI.
There’s a chance your next interview could be conducted by an AI bot.
That’s what happened to a woman named Ken, whose AI assistant started glitching and repeating the words “vertical bar pilates” over and over.
In a recent TikTok, Ken shared a recording of this part of her interview. In comments, she explained she was interviewing for a job at a studio called StretchLab in Columbus, Ohio.
In the 25-second video, Ken recorded the AI assistant, named “Alex,” malfunctioning.
“It was genuinely so creepy and weird,” Ken wrote in the caption. “Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!! It gave me the creeps so bad.”
StretchLab did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
AI hiring is inevitable
Emily DeJeu, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and an expert in AI communication and etiquette, said AI-powered video interviews are likely to become more common as companies seek to streamline and automate early hiring stages.
“In terms of whether or not this will become the norm, I think the jury’s out,” DeJeu told BI.
Any time technology promises to save time and money and make everything faster, “we by default pursue it — there’s a kind of inevitability to it,” she said.
AI is being increasingly used in the job-seeking and hiring process. Candidates are using it to help tailor their résumés, while employers use it to sift through the thousands of applications they receive.
Wider use of AI for interviews is potentially the next step, a natural response to a heated and competitive job market.
DeJeu told BI that AI systems can process information much more quickly and thoroughly. However, there are concerns about their impersonal and potentially unethical nature, especially for young job seekers who may not realize they are not talking to a person.
The human element has to remain in the process somewhere along the line, in DeJeu’s view.
“The idea that I am going to make lots of positive facial expressions to convince this AI tool that I’m a nice person, that’s just so weird,” she said. “I’m trying to convince a non-human entity that I’m a smart, capable, warm human. There’s a weirdness to it that makes me uncomfortable.”
Disclosure is key, DeJeu said — otherwise people are likely to feel insulted when they expect to be interviewed by a human and are instead met with a bot.
How to prepare for meeting an AI
DeJeu’s advice for anyone who knows they are going into an interview with an AI is to focus on the “three V’s”:
1. Visuals
The visuals are what you look like, so make sure your background is professional and you’re dressed as you would be in any other interview situation.
“Wear your suit. Think about your background,” DeJeu said. “You really want to think about how you use engaging expressions with your face and how you bring your hands into it. It’s the same kind of prep that I would give if you were going to give a presentation.”
2. Vocals
An AI is also taking note of your vocals — how fast you’re talking, your vocal variety, how often you pause, and if you use a lot of filler words.
“Can you practice your response enough that you feel really fluent in answering and you’re able to reduce your filler words?” DeJeu said.
“You don’t have a lot of these backtrack, sidetrack, tangential statements built into your answer. You can speak directionally, answer the question in full, put a period at the end when you’re done, and stop talking.”
3. Verbals
Finally, you should notice the words you’re using and the sentence structures you’re building.
DeJeu said it’s a good idea to mine job ads for keywords and make sure they say them repeatedly through the interview.
“I don’t know that a human recruiter would be kind of tallying in their minds, ‘they said collaborative leadership six times,’ but an AI tool absolutely would be able to do that,” she said.
“Your prep needs to account for the fact that AI is capturing and remembering so much more than your human interviewer.”
AI interviews seem to be cropping up more often for entry-level and part-time jobs, meaning they’ll likely affect young job seekers — Gen Zers — before anyone else.
“They really have to absorb a lot of the challenges of this disruptive moment in our history,” DeJeu said. “They are being disrupted in a way that in my lifetime, certainly, it’s never been disrupted.”
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