AI is increasingly taking over the role of human hiring managers in job interviews, but candidates are not exactly thrilled about it. Many job seekers are pushing back, calling it an "added indignity" and a red flag for company culture. While HR teams argue it’s the only way to handle the overwhelming number of applicants, job seekers aren’t convinced.
More and more, job hunters are finding themselves joining Zoom calls with faceless, robotic interviewers rather than real humans. The experience has been described as confusing, frustrating, or even dehumanizing. One candidate, Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer who's been job hunting for a few months, shared her frustration with Fortune. “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 said. During her AI interview, she quickly realized how impersonal it felt. “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 latest shift in the hiring process, which has already been transformed by technology. With HR teams spread thin, especially in large companies, AI is being used to screen applicants, schedule interviews, and handle correspondence. While these automated tools help hiring managers save time, job seekers see them as another hurdle in an already stressful process.
Some candidates have gone so far as to swear off interviews with AI altogether, believing that if a company won’t even have a human interview them, its culture must be lacking. HR experts, on the other hand, argue that AI helps streamline the initial stages of hiring, giving managers more time to have deeper, more meaningful conversations with candidates later on.
Despite the pushback from job seekers, AI interviewers are not going anywhere. “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re going to go through this thing,” says Adam Jackson, CEO of Braintrust, a company providing AI interview solutions. He insists that if candidates were truly rejecting AI interviews, companies wouldn’t be adopting them at such high rates. According to Jackson, clients are finding the tool useful and seeing strong performance, despite some complaints from applicants.
The social media buzz around AI interviews shows just how mixed the reaction is. Some candidates describe bizarre experiences with AI bots, like repeating questions endlessly or failing to answer questions about the company culture. Others report that the AI interview felt less stressful than speaking to a human.
Allen Rausch, a 56-year-old technical writer, shared his experience of AI interviews for three separate job applications. The AI bots were pleasant but couldn’t answer questions about the company or provide any context. He said that while he’d consider AI interviews in the future, he wanted a guarantee that a human would step in later on. “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.
On the other hand, Borchardt couldn’t even last through a single AI interview. “It was impersonal, irritating, and lazy,” she said. “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 at a U.K. energy company, also experienced an AI interview while job hunting. Though he understands the reasoning behind AI screening for high-volume applications, he’s not a fan. For Cobb, the use of AI made him feel like his personal growth was undervalued and raised questions about the company’s culture. “It makes me feel like they don’t value my learning and development,” he said. “Are they going to cut jobs in the future because they’ve learned robots can already recruit people?”
For hiring managers, however, AI interviewers are a welcome tool, especially for companies dealing with a large number of applicants. Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, explained that AI has become more common in early-stage screenings, particularly for high-volume roles like customer service, retail, or entry-level positions. “It’s doing that first-stage work that a lot of employers need in order to be more efficient and save time,” she said.
Not all AI interviewers are created equal. Some are basic, robotic-voiced bots with strange avatars, while others, like the ones created by Braintrust, have more natural-sounding voices and faceless avatars. Still, even the best AI interviewers have their limitations. Jackson acknowledges that AI is excellent for evaluating technical skills, but when it comes to assessing cultural fit, it’s not quite there yet. “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.”
In the end, AI is here to stay in hiring, but it’s clear that it’s not winning over all candidates. As companies embrace the convenience and efficiency of AI, job seekers will have to decide whether they’re willing to accept it as part of the process.