Companies have begun using AI to interview potential employees, and new research suggests that a number of job candidates may choose to be interviewed using AI.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Is there anything more stressful than a job interview? What about an interview conducted by AI? Like it or not, recruiting companies are really starting to get involved. The Indicator's Adrian Ma and Weilin Wong spoke with a recruiter, an economist and, yes, an AI interviewer.
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WAILIN WONG: David Koch works for PSG Global Solutions, a company that specializes in recruiting. He has a recruiting metaphor – a funnel.
DAVID KOCH: The pipeline is essentially the number of candidates coming in and the number of candidates actually being placed. You lose people at every step of the process.
ADRIAN MA: Usually PSG posts a job opening online, a few people apply and those who seem promising are contacted by a recruiter for an interview.
KOCH: Identifying talent is one thing. The next step is that you need to call them.
MA: David says that if a recruiter calls a candidate within one minute of submitting an application, there is an 85% chance that they will actually connect. But if only 15 minutes pass, the connection percentage will drop to 35%.
WONG: That's why recruiters spend hours a day just dialing and redialing the same numbers.
KOCH: The amount of time they spend just trying to make contact and how much they actually talk to someone is crazy.
MA: And what did they end up doing? The robot, of course, was brought.
ANNA: Is now a good time to talk?
MA: Yes, that's true.
So this is their AI interview bot that they developed called Anna. And to show me how it works, they asked Anna to interview me for a job in a call center.
ANNA: Can you give any advice to someone just starting out in this role?
MA: Have some empathy for what the person might be going through when they call.
ANNA: That's a great approach.
WONG: Anna said that was a good answer.
MA: It worked.
WONG: (Laughter) A+. So PSG Global had this new technology, and the problem was that they didn't have the data to prove that Anna could do the job as well as a human. So they turned to an economist at the University of Chicago named Brian Jabarian.
BRIAN JABARIAN: It took me a total of three to four years to find a firm willing to work with me.
MA: Were there any companies that just laughed in your face when you approached them with this idea?
JABARIAN: Well, most of them didn't even respond.
WONG: But then PSG said yes because they really wanted to know what impact Anna would have on the recruiting process.
MA: Brian designed an experiment in which job candidates were divided into three randomly assigned groups. The first group had to go through the normal human interview process. The second will be tasked with interviewing Anna. And the third will be given a choice: human or AI. And importantly, for all job seekers, the recruiter still reviews the interview transcripts or audio recordings and makes the actual decision about whether to offer them the job or not. Brian says that after conducting an experiment on 70,000 respondents…
JABARIAN: Given a choice, 78% of candidates prefer to be interviewed by an AI voice agent.
MA: Brian says job applicants who interviewed Anna were about half as likely to report feeling discriminated against based on their gender compared to those who interviewed a person. Interestingly, women were also more likely than men to prefer AI to interviews with humans.
WONG: The surprises went even further. Brian also found that people interviewed using AI were 12% more likely to get a job offer and about 18% more likely to start a job and stay in a job for at least a month. Of course, the next obvious question is: why?
JABARIAN: If you're very interactive, talk back and forth a lot, or demonstrate a high level of vocabulary, you increase your chances of getting a job offer.
MA: If a candidate used a lot of so-called backchannel signals, such as “uh-huh,” “uh-huh,” it reduced his chances of getting an offer. And here's the kicker. The candidates interviewed by Anna performed better on all these indicators compared to those interviewed by the person.
PSG's David Koch says they plan to introduce Anna in 80 countries and use it to recruit for many different positions. And while this will definitely mean the company will hire fewer recruiters, David says those who remain will be able to spend more time on analytical tasks and much less time simply dialing numbers.
Adrian Ma.
WONG: Weilin Wong, NPR News.
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