Blame AI for your gruelling job interview

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Job interviews are laden with opportunities for humiliation. Who wants to describe their greatest weakness to a panel of peers? Or be made to feel like a quiz show contestant with brainteasers like “how many golf balls can you fit in a Boeing 747?”. Unfortunately for job seekers, the rigmarole is getting increasingly out of hand. 

Demands from hiring committees in the tech sector are piling up. That means more interviews but also more technical tests. Alongside coding evaluations come requests for essays, lengthy take-home assignments and even days spent working with existing teams. One friend in the Bay Area made it through multiple interview rounds only to be presented with a final challenge to “entertain” the company’s leadership. There were no other instructions. She didn’t get the job. 

Recruiters will say that this is not being done to make life difficult for job seekers but because it is growing harder to find the right candidates. The blame, they say, lies with job seekers themselves. Online postings make speculative applications easy to fire off. In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers reported receiving a record 1.2mn applications for 17,000 graduate vacancies this year. Human resources software maker Workday reports that the number of global job applications is growing four times faster than job openings. 

This surplus includes those from candidates who are logging into AI chatbot ChatGPT to tailor their application with skills they may not possess. Some even try to trick recruiting software by writing in white text — listing requirements they lack in ways that will be invisible to the human eye but picked up by screening software. 

From an employer’s point of view, therefore, adding new hoops for candidates to jump through makes sense. AI-assisted applications can mask poor candidates whose failings are revealed in multiple interviews. And the likeable smooth talker who sails through in-person meetings may come undone by on-site tests or work trials. 

At some companies it is not enough to be good at your job, either. You need to show commitment to the company ethos. Amazon is known for assessing candidates on its 16 leadership principles. Fail to prove your customer obsession or ability to think big and you’ll find yourself back on the job market. 

The problem is that adding more interviews and tests exhaust candidates and interviewers and take everyone’s time away from the real work. In even more galling news, they may not even be productive. In 2016, Google declared that four interviews were enough to predict whether someone should be hired. According to the company, anything more than that had diminishing returns.  

Still, this rule does not count the barriers put in place prior to interviews. Young job seekers sometimes complain that their parents still believe it’s possible to put on a smart suit and hand a resume to the front desk when looking for work. In reality, the standard process already includes an online application, resume screening and online assessment before on-site meetings take place. Application tracking software like Oracle’s Taleo are used to filter out candidates before they get a chance to interact with anyone at a company. Unsuccessful applicants can be ghosted. 

As the process expands, so does the time it takes to secure a job. Research from US human resources adviser Josh Bersin put the average at 45 days. In fields like tech it can be far longer. Software engineer Rohit Verma has blogged about his experience securing roles in large US tech companies. At Meta, he writes that it took about four months from referral to job offer.  

This would be more palatable if it wasn’t for the tech sector’s newfound love of mass lay-offs. After engaging in a hiring spree during the pandemic, the sector cut its workforce by an estimated 264,000 last year, according to crowdsourced site Layoffs.fyi. So far this year companies including TikTok and Snap have cut over 149,000 jobs. That means some employees who engaged in these intensive interview processes are now out of a job.  

Where tech leads, other sectors tend to follow. Expect the hiring process to grow more excruciating in your own line of work soon enough. 

The good news is that there is always an exception. Sometimes, landing a job can be as simple as sending a tweet. In 2019, a 28-year-old Brit was hired to lead Tesla’s social media after he posted a picture of a giant ram with the caption: “Look at this absolute unit”. Still, taking Elon Musk’s fancy proved no more foolproof than any other hiring concept. Within a year, the social media manager had left the role.

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