The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’ (www.theguardian.com)
from FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 01:36
https://lemmy.world/post/12864368

When Ty landed an introductory phone interview with a finance and banking company last month, they assumed it would be a quick chat with a recruiter. And when they got on the phone, Ty assumed the recruiter, who introduced herself as Jaime, was human. But things got robotic.

“The voice sounded similar to Siri,” said Ty, who is 29 and lives in the DC metro area. “It was creepy.”

Ty realized they weren’t speaking to a living, breathing person. Their interviewer was an AI system, and one with a rather rude habit. Jaime asked Ty all the right questions – what’s your management style? are you a good fit for this role? – but she wouldn’t let Ty fully answer them.

“After cutting me off, the AI would respond, ‘Great! Sounds good! Perfect!’ and move on to the next question,” Ty said. “After the third or fourth question, the AI just stopped after a short pause and told me that the interview was completed and someone from the team would reach out later.” (Ty asked that their last name not be used because their current employer doesn’t know they’re looking for a job.)

A survey from Resume Builder released last summer found that by 2024, four in 10 companies would use AI to “talk with” candidates in interviews. Of those companies, 15% said hiring decisions would be made with no input from a human at all.

#technology

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autotldr@lemmings.world on 08 Mar 2024 01:40 next collapse

This is the best summary I could come up with:


“After the third or fourth question, the AI just stopped after a short pause and told me that the interview was completed and someone from the team would reach out later.” (Ty asked that their last name not be used because their current employer doesn’t know they’re looking for a job.)

“I’m hearing that employers are now discounting a lot of the information they receive that’s in written form, and want to get to a face-to-face conversation as quickly as possible with the candidates so they can properly vet them,” she explained.

Michael G is the founder of Final Round AI, an “interview co-pilot” that listens to recruiters’ questions and prompts personalized answers in real time, based on the résumé and cover letter uploaded by the interviewee.

You don’t need to be a wildly imaginative person to consider how that might affect job-seekers – Amazon reportedly scrapped an in-house hiring algorithm, trained on data submitted by applicants, that favored men and penalized résumés that included the word “women”.

“The current wave of AI uses algorithms that are probabilistic models, which means they simply rely on patterns in past data to make likely predictions,” said Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Pollak said that to avoid such bias, ZipRecruiter strips “any kind of identifiable information” like names and zip codes from résumés before putting them through an AI system.


The original article contains 1,813 words, the summary contains 234 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

cm0002@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 02:22 next collapse

We should build our own AI systems to mass apply and interview for jobs lmao, if you can’t beat em join em ig lol

catloaf@lemm.ee on 08 Mar 2024 02:37 next collapse

I’ve definitely used chatgpt to sketch a cover letter. I wouldn’t waste my time applying to a job that required one otherwise.

Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works on 08 Mar 2024 05:47 collapse

Yeah I just upload my resume and the job ad and get it to write all mine based off of those two.

FlangeSniffer@aussie.zone on 08 Mar 2024 09:02 collapse

How do you upload the resume? It just gives me images or screenshots only to upload

Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works on 08 Mar 2024 09:09 collapse

I just drag the .doc file into the chat box. It accepts a lot of different file types. You might need GPT4 instead of the free 3.5 model however.

help.openai.com/en/…/8555545-file-uploads-faq

Alborlin@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 23:51 collapse

I have a question , there are 2 inputs i use to make a cover letter , 1. My resume and 2. Job description

How do you manage to mangler them together with chat gpt? Cause ibensure that its very specific to the job ALWAYS.

Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works on 09 Mar 2024 00:02 collapse

I just upload them both together at the same time, and ask it to base my cover letter on them both. You can upload up to 20 documents for it to parse over at once.

Mind you I always go back through and visually look over it at, it might be fine 95% of the time but every now and than I need to edit a word or two.

maynarkh@feddit.nl on 08 Mar 2024 02:59 collapse

lazyapply.com

Someone already did it

cm0002@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 03:19 collapse

Hmm, 130 bucks for “lifetime” premium 750 daily applications, not bad at all considering the literally hundreds of hours this would save me in an average hunt lmao

Now we just need an automatic interviewer lol

soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz on 08 Mar 2024 06:52 collapse

It would be even better if it read your emails, filtered out rejections and created calendar invites for any interviews with summaries and notes for it.

[deleted] on 08 Mar 2024 16:22 collapse

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soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz on 08 Mar 2024 20:09 collapse

that AI does not filter out rejections and create calendar invites for any interviews with summaries and notes for it.

[deleted] on 08 Mar 2024 22:58 collapse

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darkfarmer@sh.itjust.works on 08 Mar 2024 03:37 next collapse

Honestly, everything about looking for jobs and filling open positions sucks. If AI can make the process better then I’m for it.

krashmo@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 05:50 next collapse

The problem with that is that the people defining what makes the process “better” actually enjoy making it more annoying for you. It’s going to be even more obnoxious than it already is, which is pretty goddamn terrible to start with.

darkfarmer@sh.itjust.works on 08 Mar 2024 14:36 collapse

That part where you say “people enjoy making the process worse”, seems unlikely to me. When people make stuff like this, I kind of doubt anyone is sitting there thinking “Mwhahaa these little bitches are gonna hate this!”

Like, I get it. This would probably piss me off as an applicant too. But ultimately, the goal is to hire someone. Initial phone interviews are all the same. They last like 10 or 15 minutes even with a human on the line, and they’re just looking for basic qualifications. So I also see from the hiring perspective how this could be useful. It’s meant as a baseline filter.

It might be a step in the right direction but it sounds like it’s not ready yet.

irotsoma@lemmy.world on 09 Mar 2024 02:12 collapse

Nah, lots of places try to make interviews as unbearable as possible. It’s “how they judge your ability to work under pressure”. Like my previous employer would fly you in seemingly with as many layovers as possible so you’re exhausted by that night. Put you up in a crappy hotel and make you come in super early. Put you in a tiny room and make you stay there for about 9-10 hours of intensive back-to-back interviews with a 30 min box lunch break. Pretty similar tactics as the military. And it’s not uncommon in tech.

fidodo@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 07:51 collapse

This sounds like it makes it worse for applicants

Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 15:34 collapse

Until the applicants use AI to handle that part… lol.

_number8_@lemmy.world on 08 Mar 2024 03:52 next collapse

as creepy as this is i would honestly feel way more comfortable getting screened by a robot than humans

pirrrrrrrr@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 08 Mar 2024 23:25 next collapse

Motherfucker!

If I was given an AI interview I would burn that place to the ground. The fucking disrespect.

Dempf@lemmy.zip on 09 Mar 2024 00:39 next collapse

I’ve seen this on the hiring side as well, with applicants giving responses directly from chatgpt.

Soon hiring will just be LLM talking to LLM.

MindlessZ@lemm.ee on 09 Mar 2024 00:58 next collapse

I see a lot of these. In most cases, they’re an auto-fail.

june@lemmy.world on 09 Mar 2024 01:45 collapse

Jesus. Using ChatGPT to answer interview questions?

I use it to help craft my cover letters but nothing past that. It seems like that is the limit of the responsible use of ChatGPT in applications.

Dempf@lemmy.zip on 09 Mar 2024 06:32 collapse

Yeah, we were shocked. We’d ask some basic questions from their resume like “which tool do you prefer, a or b and why?” Mostly just trying to coax out some jargon that you’d really only know if you actually ever used the tool. We would get a long pause and then a wordy response basically just summarizing things. It sounded exactly like how chatgpt would respond.

lightnegative@lemmy.world on 10 Mar 2024 04:34 collapse

You didn’t want to work there anyways

erwan@lemmy.ml on 10 Mar 2024 11:31 collapse

Still super annoying to have to go through that