Students applying for graduate jobs this summer can take advantage of a new personal interview coach. If they send in a specific job description, they can receive tailored interview questions and answers — and feedback on their own — for free.
The coach provided by the job search engine Adzuna is not a human, but an artificial intelligence robot called Prepper. It can generate interview questions for more than 1 million real-time roles at large companies in industries ranging from technology and financial services to manufacturing and retail.
For graduate work in PwC’s actuarial practice, the chatbot spits out questions like: “What skills do you think an actuarial consultant should have?” and “How do you explain actuarial concepts to clients from non-financial backgrounds?”. When users answer questions, Prepper generates a score out of 100 and tells them which parts worked well and which parts fell short.
Prepper is part of a new generation of chatbots powered by generative AI—from ChatGPT to Bard and Claude. Chatbots are trained on vast amounts of text from the Internet, including books, newspapers, blogs, videos, and image captions. They can generate plausible and complex text that is largely indistinguishable from human writing.
“In the last 12-18 months, it’s gone crazy,” says Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter. “Of course it’s very hyped at the moment, but there are a lot of smart tools out there[to help with]recruitment that help people find jobs more easily.”
AI is not a new tool for recruiting and job hunting. Over the past decade, it has been used primarily to improve the efficiency and cost of processes for employers — from searching resumes for keywords to filtering job applicants for video interviews.
But generative AI tools are rebalancing the power dynamics over applicants. “A lot of the recent improvements we’ve seen in artificial intelligence have been on the side of candidates,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organizational psychologist and recruitment technologist. “Years ago, recruiters pretended to use AI to look cool when they weren’t. Now they pretend not to use AI.”
When Chamorro-Premuzic was trying to hire for a position recently, he asked candidates if they had tried generating artificial intelligence. “They said, ‘If it wasn’t for ChatGPT, I wouldn’t be sitting in front of you right now.'” Their resumes, cover letters and applications were all written by AI.
Chamorro-Premuzic respected honesty and thought it was worthwhile to hire someone who was technically savvy, so he hired this guy. Others were less enthusiastic, warning that AI could herald the end of the traditional job application process.
“Generative AI can create really good profiles — there may be some mistakes, but only the individual will recognize them, not the employer,” says Matt Jones of recruiting tech firm Cielo. Questions about the relevance of applications, especially early in a career. I wonder if this is the death knell for resumes.”
For graduates in an increasingly competitive job market, chatbots are a way to navigate a potentially overwhelming process. Ayushman Nath, a second-year undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, said many of his peers had played with ChatGPT, the public chatbot released by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, and asked it to write a cover letter for a particular company. He knows people who use ChatGPT to write cover letters and applications to get promoted through early rounds or land internships.
“From my experience, it’s good at getting over the initial hurdle. The initial rounds of filtering are impersonal, and they feel very remote and dehumanizing. Everything is so automated,” Nath says of today’s hiring process .
Nath and his colleagues also undergo automated video interviews run by recruiting technology providers such as HireVue, which record applicants answering predetermined questions, often with a time limit for each answer. An employer’s hiring manager will sometimes watch the recording; or the platform’s AI algorithm will assess each candidate’s performance, looking for various keywords from job descriptions.
The company has yet to launch any generative AI products, but its chief data scientist, Lindsey Zuloaga, said her team is testing tools like interview prep chatbots and new ways to extract information from video interviews. “These systems are powerful, but they can also go wrong. How do we implement it in a prudent and ethical way?” she said.
Grace Lordan, an economist at the London School of Economics and director of the Inclusion Initiative, which studies diversity in corporate environments, says companies, especially tech groups, are experimenting with generative artificial intelligence to conduct initial interviews.
“One of the biggest areas of bias is actually the interview,” she said. “This is people’s affinity bias, or representation bias, which means selecting people who look similar to other people in the organization.”
Interviews conducted by AI could go some way towards removing this bias, she said. “Generative AI is very convincing as an avatar. Using AI as another important data point will allow machines to fight back (against human bias).”
Amid global skills and workforce shortages, and their push to increase diversity, more employers are also using new assessment methods to broaden the pool of candidates they hire. Automated systems designed for hiring a more diverse workforce can find candidates who might have been overlooked because of health issues, employment gaps or lack of degrees or coming from non-traditional backgrounds.
But while ChatGPT is a useful starting point for a cover letter or to learn about a potential employer’s background, recruiters say it’s no substitute for writing your own application.
“Companies are looking for relationships with people out there, like contacting someone in the company or a piece of information that isn’t on the website. And those things can only be cultivated through human interaction, not AI models,” said Nath, a student at the University of Cambridge.
Adzuna’s Hunter agrees: “My caveat to job candidates is that AI can be a good co-pilot, but don’t let technology try to do everything for you.” . . This is very emerging technology and it spits out The same answer. If you let the initial interaction with an employer be entirely the responsibility of an AI, you won’t be good at the job. “