When AI is your job interviewer

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Speaker 1 This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrienne Ma.

Speaker 2 And I'm Waylon Wong. In the world of work, is there anything more stressful than a job interview?

Speaker 2 You know, these high-stakes encounters that can determine the course of your financial future, whether you land your dream job or have a job at all.

Speaker 1 Now imagine how stressed you'd feel if they told you your job interview will be conducted by AI.

Speaker 1 Like it or not, more companies are actually starting to do this. And the results of a new study suggest that it might not all be bad news for workers.

Speaker 2 So today on the show, we dig into that study, and Adrian gets grilled by an AI job recruiter named Anna.

Speaker 1 Will I get the job? Meh.

Speaker 2 We will find out after that break.

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Speaker 1 PSG Global Solutions is a company that specializes in recruiting.

Speaker 1 A company you might call if you need to hire a lot of, say, call center agents or warehouse workers or nurses, but don't have a lot of time.

Speaker 2 David Koch works for PSG, where his title, it's a very fancy one. Chief of Transformation and Innovation.

Speaker 2 Though funnily enough, his metaphor for recruiting is a very analog piece of technology, a funnel. And it's like a leaky funnel at that.

Speaker 4 The funnel is essentially a number of candidates going in, a number of candidates actually being placed.

Speaker 4 Right. And every step of the way, every step in the process, you lose people.

Speaker 1 So typically, PSG posts a job online, a bunch of people apply, and the ones that seem promising are contacted by a recruiter for an interview. David says, this is where the funnel starts to leak.

Speaker 4 You know, it's one thing attracting talent, and it's one thing identifying talent. The next step is you have to get them on the phone.

Speaker 1 And the more time that passes after a candidate applies, the harder that is.

Speaker 1 David says, if a recruiter calls an applicant within one minute of applying, there's an 85% chance of them actually connecting. But if just 15 minutes go by, that connect rate drops to just 35%.

Speaker 2 And that's why recruiters end up spending hours a day just dialing and re-dialing the same numbers.

Speaker 4 The amount of time they're spending just trying to connect and how much they actually talk to someone is crazy. And then those that are connecting too, very often are just like, I'm not interested.

Speaker 2 I feel like if David were an actor in one of these made-for-tv infomercials this is the part where he would look directly into the camera distraught and he would say there's gotta be a better way

Speaker 1 yeah and so what did they end up doing uh they brought in a robot of course

Speaker 7 uh hello hi adrian this is anna the ai recruiter from tp calling to discuss the customer service representative role you recently applied for. Is this a good time to talk?

Speaker 5 Yes, it is.

Speaker 7 Awesome. Just a quick heads up.

Speaker 1 So this is their AI interview bot that they developed called Anna.

Speaker 1 And to show me how it worked, they had Anna interview me for a call center job.

Speaker 7 Can you describe a situation where you had to manage multiple competing demands while handling a customer call?

Speaker 6 Are you talking about like multitasking?

Speaker 7 Yes, that's exactly what I'm referring to.

Speaker 2 Nice one, Adrian, stalling for time.

Speaker 1 Thank you. I handled it just like a real interview

Speaker 6 because I'm often

Speaker 6 interviewing or having conversations with people.

Speaker 7 I'm listening. Please go on.

Speaker 5 How do you handle multiple tasks or interviews?

Speaker 6 Yeah, and sometimes things come up in the conversation where

Speaker 1 it's going pretty well, don't you think?

Speaker 2 I think so.

Speaker 7 Could you think of any advice you might give to someone who is just starting out in this role?

Speaker 6 I guess I would say

Speaker 6 try to imagine yourself in the other person's shoes and

Speaker 6 have some empathy for

Speaker 6 what a person might be going through when they call.

Speaker 7 That's a great approach. Having empathy for the customer's situation can go a long way in providing excellent service.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I'm not feeling great about making it to the next round, to be honest.

Speaker 2 No, I thought that was a good answer. Anna said it was a good answer.

Speaker 1 Nailed it.

Speaker 2 A plus. So PSG Global has this new technology.
And the problem was they didn't have the data to prove Anna could do the job as well as a human.

Speaker 2 So they turned to an economist at the University of Chicago named Brian Jabarian.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and coincidentally, Brian had been looking for a company just like this, like one that was trying to use AI at a broad scale, and importantly, willing to give him access to detailed data on how it was going.

Speaker 8 It took me three, two, four years, basically, in total to find a firm willing to partner with me.

Speaker 1 Were there any companies that just like laughed in your face when you approached them with this idea?

Speaker 8 Well, most of them even didn't reply.

Speaker 2 But then, then, PSG said yes, because it really wanted to know what effect Anna would have on the recruiting process.

Speaker 1 To test these questions, Brian devised an experiment where job candidates were split into three randomly assigned groups. The first group would go through the normal interview process with a human.

Speaker 1 The second would be assigned to an interview with Anna.

Speaker 1 And the third would be given a choice, human or AI, whatever they preferred.

Speaker 1 Now, importantly, for all the job applicants, a human recruiter would still review the transcript or the audio from the interviews and make the actual decision of whether or not to offer a job.

Speaker 2 Brian's hypothesis was that Anna would not do as well as a human. And you can imagine why, right?

Speaker 2 Like, who among us actually enjoys calling up a business just to get that automated voice that is like,

Speaker 2 why don't you read me a 16-digit number and I'll, you know,

Speaker 2 and then you're just like, operator, operator.

Speaker 1 And yet, Brian says after running this experiment on some 70,000 interviewees.

Speaker 8 It was quite shocking or like surprising, which is when given a choice, 78% of candidates chose to be interviewed by an AI voice agent.

Speaker 2 Given a choice, 78%

Speaker 2 of people chose AI. Who would have thunk?

Speaker 1 I was also very surprised to hear this. And one explanation seems to be that people felt the AI would be, for lack of a better term, less judgy.

Speaker 1 And in fact, Brian says job applicants who interviewed with Anna were about half as likely to report feeling discriminated against based on their gender compared to those who interviewed with a human.

Speaker 1 And interestingly, women were also more likely than men to choose the AI over the human interview.

Speaker 2 But the surprises went even further.

Speaker 2 Brian also found that people who went through the AI interview process were 12% more likely to get a job offer and about 18% more likely to start and stay in the job for at least a month.

Speaker 2 So it seems like Anna was better at interviewing than the human recruiters. Of course, the next obvious question is why.

Speaker 2 Brian says when he analyzed the interviews, he noticed some patterns, that people who got interviews tended to display certain, what he calls, linguistic features.

Speaker 8 If you display a lot of like interactivity, you have a lot of back and forth, or you display a high level of vocabulary richness, you increase your chances of getting a job offer.

Speaker 1 On the flip side, if a candidate used a lot of so-called back channel cues, like, uh, mm-hmm, uh-huh, that decreased their chance of getting an offer. And here is the kicker.

Speaker 1 Candidates interviewed by Anna did better on all these measures compared to those interviewed by a human.

Speaker 2 Okay, so putting this all together, it's almost like Anna allowed people to be better versions of themselves. And Brian says the psychological aspect of all this is definitely worth more study.

Speaker 1 And as for the company, PSG, you could imagine that having a recruiter that can work 24 hours a day and be infinitely replicated, that is seemingly less prone to human bias and pretty good at its job to boot, is a big freaking deal.

Speaker 1 And you would be right. David Koch at PSG says they plan to roll Anna out in 80 countries and use it to recruit for a lot of different kinds of jobs.

Speaker 1 And while it will definitely mean the company hires fewer human recruiters, David says the ones who remain will get to spend more time on analytical tasks and a lot less time just dialing numbers.

Speaker 4 The role of the recruiter is changing, and I think it's a positive change. It's gonna get more difficult, but it becomes a much more meaningful job, I think.

Speaker 2 By the way, David says there are dozens of competitor companies developing technology like ANA. So maybe sooner than we think, robots will be interviewing us for jobs.

Speaker 1 You know there's been all this talk about how AI is too sycophantic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's always sucking up at the same time.

Speaker 1 But I feel like now we have to study up on how to suck up to machines.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim and engineered by Debbie Daughtry. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, Keikin Cannon is our editor, and the indicators of production of NPR.

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