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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
How to conquer the job interview jitters when you're interviewing with an AI. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. Imagine you're getting ready for a job interview. What do you do to prepare? If you're me, you have your younger sister do a mock interview. You also panic buy a professional-looking work bag to bring with you.
Now imagine you learn your interviewer is an AI. This is becoming a more common occurrence. Employers are outsourcing not just the screening of applications to artificial intelligence, but also the interviewing.
Chapter 2: What should you do to prepare for a job interview?
Ray Smith wrote about how to prepare for this experience for the Wall Street Journal. For the reporting, he did a couple job interviews with an AI, and he said they were nerve-wracking.
So what happens is, you know, you're sitting there, you're trying not to look at yourself, you're trying to look at the camera, and you get a question. You basically just get a question. There's no sort of, hi, how are you doing, or nice to meet you. And it might start off with something like, You know, what are your thoughts on customer service or what makes good customer service to you?
And then you will have to reply by video. And so I found myself sort of like floundering and really nervous because I just wasn't sure. I wasn't getting any cues. And so I think it just takes a lot of getting used to.
Do you know what happens after the interview? Does the AI then give recommendations to the human employer?
My understanding is that, yes, what happens is the video, once it's completed, it is submitted to an HR or hiring manager. And so an actual human will review. But there is an assessment. The AI system gives an assessment of how you did that. on the video. And these hiring platforms claim they're not scoring you on things like eye contact or even nervousness or if you sound flustered.
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Chapter 3: How is AI changing the job interview process?
And so there's debate about how much of that is true, that they don't actually track that. And there's some legal questions about whether they could, even if they did. But there is an assessment, and the assessment is basically how well you answered the questions.
And if the questions sort of match the skill set, you know, how well they match the skill set or aligned with the skill set for the job that you're applying for.
What can people do to prepare?
Several recruiters and career consultants that I talked with told me some of the best things to do is to act as if you are being interviewed by a human. Like, for instance, the eye contact thing. They said that although these hiring platforms may not be grading you or scoring you on eye contact, it's just really important that you maintain eye contact with the camera.
And it's for several reasons. It's A, so that your eyes are focused and so you look focused, but also you just lessen the chance that the AI may think you are looking at notes or reading notes or cheating with some chat GPT.
Another way to prepare is just like pretending that you're going through the process, meaning recording yourself as if you were actually being interviewed, but doing it several times so that you feel... comfortable doing it when you're actually live.
Some other tips that they gave were to remember not to try to talk in a robotic way, like the way I'm doing now, like because you think that this is what the algorithm wants. It's like try to speak as naturally as you can, even in this unnatural environment. So those were some of the tips that they were giving.
I will say this feels like a little bit of a slippery slope where at first, you know, companies were outsourcing screening applications. Now they're outsourcing interviewing. You know, at what point might they just outsource the hiring decision to the AI?
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What happens during an AI job interview?
And it has people wondering, you know, how far should we go with this? And so what you're hearing a lot more now in HR circles is, is this idea of AI plus HI, which is artificial intelligence plus human intelligence. And maybe it's the HR folks just trying to save their jobs, but they're talking about human intelligence is needed in this process at some point in the process.
And it's because AI can make mistakes. And so there's a lot of talk that humans should not be totally removed from the hiring decision, that AI shouldn't take it all over. But there is some fear that AI will. And again, it goes back to the efficiency argument that it just takes less time and you can do this faster and you can get to what you actually want quicker with these objective assessments.
But there's also the people who are arguing that this is a fairer way to hire because it's just based on sort of objective skills and objective answers rather than subjective things.
We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. We're back with Ray Smith, a workplace reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Are there certain industries or kinds of jobs where people are more likely to encounter an AI interviewer?
I wondered about that too. And right now, it's still early, but so far it seems to run the gamut. It can be an automaker looking for technicians. It can be an airline looking for cabin crew members. But it could also be a retailer looking for customer service people.
And it wouldn't be far fetched to see this happening for all sorts of industries, white collar and blue collar, even industry that you think would have been sort of reluctant to try this because, you know, they're all about we need the human person involved or our industry is so tactile and so about, you know, the people. The efficiency thing is really a compelling argument.
Was there anything you learned while reporting this that didn't make it into your article?
One thing that I learned of going through this process was just how the job interview is really evolving. You know, I remember being interviewed in person throughout my career. And sometimes you'd be like, what does that question have to do with the job? Because it would be like... Or you hear that question like, where do you see yourself in five years? Right here, working right here, very hard.
Or just these questions that they're trying to get to know you. I mean, that's what the goal is. But some of them you're like, why did that come up? Or how should I answer that? And what is the right answer to that? And did I lose the job because I failed to give the right answer to that five-year question?
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Chapter 5: Do AI systems provide feedback after interviews?
And so what I'm finding interesting is that when I went through these interviews myself, there was very little of those kinds of get-to-know-you questions. And it made me wonder if interviews are headed towards a place where they really just want to know, can you do this job? Do you get along well with others? Or do you play well with others at the company? Are you a good culture fit?
So it's just interesting that Companies may use this to just want to get down to the nitty gritty. Can this person do this job? Are they skilled enough to do it? Rather than the let's get to know them aspect of it. It's just really interesting to see where this might take the concept of the job interview.
Ray Smith covers the workplace for The Wall Street Journal. We'll have a link to Ray's reporting on our website, marketplacetech.org. Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. I'm Stephanie Hughes, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.
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