5 days ago
Jobs: Is artificial intelligence going to be your next interviewer?
About seven months ago, Prasanna Veerapandi received an email informing him that he had landed an interview for a high-paying role as a classic Python developer in Dubai. At the time, he was based in Singapore and hoping to relocate to the UAE, so the email was a welcome development.
'It explained that I could schedule the interview at my preferred time a week or two in advance and had other instructions as well — like there was a formal dress code for the interview, there had to be zero noise in the background, and a good Internet connection was a must during the call,' explains Veerapandi, who now lives in Abu Dhabi.
On the day of the interview, Veerapandi clicked on a link and entered a web application that looked a lot like Zoom or Google Meet where he was greeted by, well, no one. There were no human heads on the screen to exchange pleasantries with.
Instead, the screen was split into two. 'Half the screen was reserved for the interview transcript and the other half was for my video,' he says. Questions rolled out on the screen and as Veerapandi answered them, he watched his voice getting converted into text on screen.
That's when it hit him — the whole process, starting with that email, was managed by artificial intelligence, or AI (and, he learnt later, AI-based recruitment platform Vettio). Veerapandi didn't get a callback but the experience was surreal and thrilling enough to share with his friends in Singapore. 'They were amazed,' he says.
AI-powered virtual recruiters and interviewers are not the future — they are very much part of the present as companies around the world have begun integrating AI into HR-specific tasks, including interviews, which many, until recently, believed was too sacrosanct to be touched by AI.
In the UAE, for instance, IT solutions provider Business Experts MEA is exploring chatbot-assisted interviews to streamline initial candidate screening, says Claire Abboud, head of HRMS, eXperts People 365 at Business Experts MEA LLC. 'These tools can accelerate response times and reduce bias in early-stage evaluations,' she explains. The company already uses AI across its HR systems like 'candidate shortlisting, leave requests, receipt-based expense claims, and employee frequently asked questions,' she says, and 'voice-activated self-service and AI-driven workforce planning will be next'.
NEED FOR SPEED
Just minutes before our conversation, Aws Ismail, director of recruitment, outsourcing and training provider Marc Ellis, sent an offer letter to a candidate who had been sourced, interviewed, shortlisted and invited for a final, face-to-face interview in two short working days entirely through their six-month-old 'Smart AI Voice Recruiter', Sarah.
Recruiters are typically expected to select three candidates for clients, after surfing through hundreds of applications, within 48 hours so AI's superhuman speed is an invaluable asset. The most industrious human recruiter can perhaps contact about 15 to 20 candidates in a day, but Sarah can reach out to 1,000 to 3,000 candidates at the same time, says Ismail. 'And when a candidate speaks, it's able to understand whether the person has the required technical skill sets and is suited for the job as it can retain vast amounts of information and knowledge about a specific job or the latest technologies,' he adds. Sarah also generates a report with the names of the shortlisted candidates along with extra inputs, like they are '80 per cent or 90 per cent fit for the role', and these reports speed up their 'overall sourcing and interviewing time by about 40 per cent,' says Ismail. 'Our recruiters then pick up the phone and talk to these shortlisted candidates.'
Sumit Kumar Singh is the founder of AceAI, which works with higher education setups to teach students about AI, offers consulting services to corporates who want to become 'AI-first' entities, and delivers AI products based on their requirements. 'We help them to build what they need — this could be an AI interviewer, internal policy bots, call summariser or help to rate resumes,' says Singh. He explains that AI virtual recruiters and interviewers fall under the category of 'Agentic AI' and that although there is high interest around it, it can be 'massive overkill for standard, rule-based processes where the outcomes are pre-determined and defined, with no surprises. Like, classifications, categorisation, ticket status and so on,' he elaborates.
He also highlights the pitfalls of using them — the most obvious one being that they are unable to read visual cues. 'And false positives may get filtered as it may be easy to fake your way in with a virtual interviewer,' he adds.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
Last year, Sonny Dhamayana, who works in AI and blockchain technology, attended five such interviews. Like Veerapandi, Dhamayana didn't know he would be speaking to an AI interviewer until he sat facing a humanoid (three interviews were voice and text-based). The interview was a technical one, which included questions on topics like coding. 'It kept repeating my answers to ensure that it got them right before recording and analysing my answers,' says Dhamayana.
The next round of interviews was conducted by humans, but he points out that companies should clearly state in their emails to candidates that interviews are going to be conducted by an AI recruiter, and that their responses will be recorded and analysed.
'I feel like they took some data from me. We need to focus on having responsible and trustworthy AI,' he says, adding that he would probably prefer AI to conduct technical interviews as questions are typically quite direct and to the point but have a human interviewer take over in the later rounds, where candidates and recruiters are likely to discuss the role, work timings, salary and other details. 'But the good part is that you get the results the same day,' he says.
Veerapandi took a few minutes to adjust to his interview, which lasted for about an hour. With the benefit of hindsight, he reflects that one has to keep answers crisp and to the point. The questions were based on his CV and it was impossible to steer the conversation away from areas he wasn't an expert in and concentrate on his strengths instead, like he would have been able to do in a regular interview.
'But an AI interviewer will ask follow-up questions and move on to the next topic only when it is 100 per cent satisfied,' he says. In fact, when he did try to discuss his strengths, Veerapandi says that it politely suggested that he stick to the specific topic it had broached. 'Because it knows the clear prompt, your resume and the job description,' he says.
However, the name of the company that was hiring wasn't revealed at any point and Veerapandi was unable to ask questions about the role as the interview did not facilitate two-way communication. 'You could ask it to clarify a question but it was mostly one-way communication as it had a plan and went about executing it like a machine,' he says, describing the interview as more of 'first-level filtering'.
And as someone who also conducts interviews after pouring over hundreds of CVs for a single job vacancy, Veerapandi feels that using AI in the initial rounds of recruitment can save a lot of time and identify the right candidates early.
Companies insist they are striving to strike a balance between AI and the human workforce in the field of HR. 'AI is a powerful accelerator, but it's not a substitute for empathy,' explains Abboud. 'While it can reduce bias, handle administrative tasks and support predictive insights, decisions around culture fit and emotional wellbeing still require human intuition. It's all about balance — letting machines do the heavy lifting so humans can stay human. And final interviews and team fit assessments still benefit from human dialogue. Responsible AI means keeping ethics and transparency front and centre — not replacing people, but empowering them.'
Ismail, too, points out that the number one skill set in recruitment is building relationships and establishing trust. 'And AI cannot replace that fully, but it will enable recruiters to, like I said, make quicker decisions and to get the right candidates quickly.'
