AI recruiting is all the rage — as employers hand the screening of new hires over to robots: ‘Seemed insane’

It’s the rise of the robo-recruiters.

Employers are turning to artificial intelligence to screen potential new human hires.

AI recruiting software is increasingly subbing in for actual people during preliminary interviews — with a fake person quizzing candidates and inquiring about their skills, before delivering their findings to managers.

“A year ago this idea seemed insane,” Arsham Ghahramani, co-founder and chief executive officer of Toronto-based AI recruiting startup Ribbon, told Bloomberg. “Now it’s quite normalized.”

Companies say the goal is to ultimately make the interview process more efficient and accessible for candidates — without needing human recruiters to be online all day.

For employers, particularly those hiring at high volume, the switch can save hundreds of hours of manpower per week.

For others who’ve seen a dramatic rise in candidates employing AI to answer interview questions, they’re simply meeting the market where it’s at.

Canadian nonprofit Propel Impact, a social impact investing organization, said the rise of the use of ChatGPT for application materials had become widespread.

“They were all the same,” Cheralyn Chok, Propel’s co-founder and executive director, told Bloomberg. “Same syntax, same patterns.”

The shift comes as a majority of Americans polled last year by Consumer Reports said that they were uncomfortable with the use of AI in high-stakes decisions about their lives.

The implementation of using AI to interact with job candidates on screen has been in the works for years at this point, according to Bloomberg.

“The first year ChatGPT came out, recruiters weren’t really down for this,” HeyMilo CEO Sabashan Ragavan said. “But the technology has gotten a lot better as time has gone on.”

But with all things tech, it’s not always 100% glitch-free.

Some TikTok users have posted their experiences with AI recruiters, with one in particular going viral when her interviewer at a Stretch Lab in Ohio malfunctioned and repeated the phrase “vertical bar pilates” 14 times in 25 seconds.

“I thought it was really creepy and I was freaked out,” she told 404 Media in a recent interview about the AI interviewer, powered by startup Apriora. “I didn’t find it funny at all until I had posted it on TikTok, and the comments made me feel better.”

Aaron Wang, Apriora’s co-founder and CEO, claimed that the error was due to the model misreading the term “Pilates,” Bloomberg reported.

“We’re not going to get it right every single time,” he said. “The incident rate is well under 0.001%.”