Candidates say they'd rather risk staying unemployed than talk to another robot

Summary

The next time you get buttoned-up and sit down for a long-awaited job interview, you might not find a human on the other end of the call. Instead, job-hunters are now joining Zoom meetings only to be greeted by AI interviewers. Candidates tell Fortune they’re either confused, intrigued, or straight-up dejected when the robotic, faceless bots join the calls. “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,” Debra Borchardt, a seasoned writer and editor who has been on the job-hunt for three months, tells Fortune. “Within minutes, I was like, ‘I don’t like this. This is awful.’ 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 newest change to the hiring process that has been upended by the advanced technology. With HR teams dwindling and hiring managers tasked to review thousands of applicants for a single role, they’re optimizing their jobs by using AI to filter top applicants, schedule candidate interviews, and automate correspondence about next steps in the process. AI interviewers may be a god-send for middle-managers, but job-seekers see them as only another hurdle in the intense hunt for work. The experience for some job-hunters has been so poor that they’re swearing off interviews conducted by AI altogether. Candidates tell Fortune that AI interviewers make them feel unappreciated to the point where they’d rather skip out on potential job opportunities, reasoning the company’s culture can’t be great if human bosses won’t make the time to interview them. But HR experts argue the opposite; since AI interviewers can help hiring managers save time in first-round calls, the humans have more time to have more meaningful conversations with applicants down the line. Job-seekers and HR are starkly divided on how they feel about the tech, but one thing is fact—AI interviewers aren’t going...