When a Company Does Job Interviews with a Malfunctioning AI - and Then Rejects You (slate.com) 26
IBM laid off "a couple hundred" HR workers and replaced them with AI agents. "It's becoming a huge thing," says Mike Peditto, a Chicago-area consultant with 15 years of experience advising companies on hiring practices. He tells Slate "I do think we're heading to where this will be pretty commonplace."
Although A.I. job interviews have been happening since at least 2023, the trend has received a surge of attention in recent weeks thanks to several viral TikTok videos in which users share videos of their A.I. bots glitching. Although some of the videos were fakes posted by a creator whose bio warns that his content is "all satire," some are authentic — like that of Kendiana Colin, a 20-year-old student at Ohio State University who had to interact with an A.I. bot after she applied for a summer job at a stretching studio outside Columbus. In a clip she posted online earlier this month, Colin can be seen conducting a video interview with a smiling white brunette named Alex, who can't seem to stop saying the phrase "vertical-bar Pilates" in an endless loop...
Representatives at Apriora, the startup company founded in 2023 whose software Colin was forced to engage with, did not respond to a request for comment. But founder Aaron Wang told Forbes last year that the software allowed companies to screen more talent for less money... (Apriora's website claims that the technology can help companies "hire 87 percent faster" and "interview 93 percent cheaper," but it's not clear where those stats come from or what they actually mean.)
Colin (first interviewed by 404 Media) calls the experience dehumanizing — wondering why they were told dress professionally, since "They had me going the extra mile just to talk to a robot." And after the interview, the robot — and the company — then ghosted them with no future contact. "It was very disrespectful and a waste of time."
Houston resident Leo Humphries also "donned a suit and tie in anticipation for an interview" in which the virtual recruiter immediately got stuck repeating the same phrase. Although Humphries tried in vain to alert the bot that it was broken, the interview ended only when the A.I. program thanked him for "answering the questions" and offering "great information" — despite his not being able to provide a single response. In a subsequent video, Humphries said that within an hour he had received an email, addressed to someone else, that thanked him for sharing his "wonderful energy and personality" but let him know that the company would be moving forward with other candidates.
Representatives at Apriora, the startup company founded in 2023 whose software Colin was forced to engage with, did not respond to a request for comment. But founder Aaron Wang told Forbes last year that the software allowed companies to screen more talent for less money... (Apriora's website claims that the technology can help companies "hire 87 percent faster" and "interview 93 percent cheaper," but it's not clear where those stats come from or what they actually mean.)
Colin (first interviewed by 404 Media) calls the experience dehumanizing — wondering why they were told dress professionally, since "They had me going the extra mile just to talk to a robot." And after the interview, the robot — and the company — then ghosted them with no future contact. "It was very disrespectful and a waste of time."
Houston resident Leo Humphries also "donned a suit and tie in anticipation for an interview" in which the virtual recruiter immediately got stuck repeating the same phrase. Although Humphries tried in vain to alert the bot that it was broken, the interview ended only when the A.I. program thanked him for "answering the questions" and offering "great information" — despite his not being able to provide a single response. In a subsequent video, Humphries said that within an hour he had received an email, addressed to someone else, that thanked him for sharing his "wonderful energy and personality" but let him know that the company would be moving forward with other candidates.
Signs You Shouldn't be Applying There ... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of these applicants should be grateful! These companies just warned them, in no uncertain terms, that they are incompetent and don't respect their employees. Working for them will be miserable, so you should go get hired somewhere else.
I *wish* humans would save me the trouble of trying to get a job by just repeating "vertical bar pilates", instead of making me go through multiple rounds of interviews, plus a week or more of employment, before finally revealing what idiots they are (and that I never should have applied for the job in the first place).
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. And is there an AI that actually functions well enough for this? Granted, maybe to handle the most obviously good/bad candidates, but what about the other, perhaps, more atypical personalities or experiences, especially on the good side? Not every good candidate fits the molds.
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Second, if a company is too busy to interview someone, then they are too busy to care about you as an employee.
Third, there is no AI that is good enough to handle this, in fact I would use it as a way to hack into the company.
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I do believe that companies are going to eventually figure out this doesn't work and is actually costing them money and missed talent. But, unfortunately, in the near term it's the prospective employees who are going to feel the pain.
Personally, I'm glad I'm basically at retirement age. I quite enjoy my recently-acquired current role (it's the only reason I'm still working, frankly); but if something changed, or if my employer decided to end my position, I can and would just retire - I just can't see myself
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Indeed. An AI interviewer will never reject me. I will leave if anybody tries to do that to me. I guess these companies only want to hire desperate low-skill workers...
They just want h-1bs (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the things that really pisses me off is seeing idiots freaking out because we let fruit pickers into the country and completely ignoring Trump and musk both pushing for more high skill workers and getting them.
It was a little bit of outrage on the right wing when musk and Trump said they wanted more h-1bs but it was very very quickly forgotten because most right wingers can't focus on what they really want because they are too immersed in propaganda. That's how even though it took 10 years they eventually started freaking out and panicking over trans girls in sports despite the fact that there's all 34 of them in the entire country out of half a million...
Meanwhile Trump continues to increase the number of people that can come here and take the actual desirable jobs. I guess when he kicks out all the Mexicans you can go pick fruit instead of writing code...
Forgive me but god do I ever hate (Score:1)
Those incompetent Indian h-1bs. They are the most IBM employees. Of course none of the supplies to somebody going for an H1B. They can get a degree printed from a 1980s.matrix printer and they're good to go. Worse than they are allowed in the country. So now you've got natsi saluting Elon Musk in charge and he wants as many H1Bs as he can get infinite H1Bs.
Yeah they've managed to keep their website from completely collapsing, mostly thanks to you ridiculously overworked H1B employees. But the actual compa
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One of the things that really pisses me off is seeing idiots freaking out because we let fruit pickers into the country and completely ignoring Trump and musk both pushing for more high skill workers and getting them.
They don't understand the high skill jobs. They do understand fruit picking, nominally anyway. They don't seem to understand that they don't want to pick fruit for a living, though, that part is a little weird.
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Reminds me of the UK mussel-farmer that was so proud he voted for Brexit and that now the UK had total control over trade conditions. But he also said he sold 95% of his produce to the EU and did not know how that would continue. These people are just terminally dumb and cannot think rationally even when their lifes depend on it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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One of the software companies mentioned was founded by "A. Wang."
Any relation to I.C. Weiner?
No, but his distant cousin is I. Seymour Butz.
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Nobody wants people anymore (Score:2)
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Yeah, I doubt these laid-off HR agents are going to find another job in HR when all the companies are doing this, and a recession coming. A bunch of them will end up waiting tables and doing delivery. With incomes cut in half and health insurance gone, they won't be able to pay for the overpriced SUVs and "luxury housing" that's been pushed on them. (Man, remember when you could buy just a regular house, and a regular car? When they still made those things?)
I don't know about "World War 3" - certainly small
It's Relative (Score:4, Interesting)
While I would hope a company like IBM had competent HR, there are so many organizations whose human-administered hiring process is so fucked up, that throwing darts at photos of the candidates would lead to better results.
For example, I think the AI that got stuck repeating itself probably understands my work about as well as the interviewer who wanted to focus on what I did 20 years ago in high school and immediately after graduating, rather than anything recent or relevant to the job. (No, there was nothing weird I did in school, but he was trying to do some shitty psychoanalysis-by-numbers hiring methodology, and opened immediately with a focus on high school.)
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From the few contacts I had with IBM "consultants", IBM had not had competend HR for at least 10 years.
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AI Interview: this is not a good place to work (Score:3)
Using an AI to interview people simply sends the message: we don't care enough about you to even talk to you. Don't work here.
It takes one to know one (Score:2)
AI interviewers will be hiring AI applicants, because the tokens will match.
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"Supercharging your business with agentic symmetries" - sounds like something the job-creators would leap at the chance to do.
Old news (Score:2)
Google has been doing this for ages, even prior to becoming one of the many subsidiaries of Alphabet, via YouTube. As a content creator, unless you are in the top 1%, you hardly have access to a human, and most appeals falls into deaf AI bots. Yet, the platform continues to grow, attracting more content creators, all in the hopes they can make a living without taking strikes and not losing it all thanks to the lack of humans.
Re: Old news (Score:2)