Students applying to graduate school this summer can benefit from a new personal interview coach. If they submit a specific job description, they can get personalized interview questions and answers—and feedback on their own answers—all for free.
The coach offered by the Adzuna job search system is not a human, but an artificial intelligence bot known as Prepper. It can generate interview questions for more than 1 million live roles at large companies, in industries ranging from technology and financial services to manufacturing and retail.
For a graduate job in PwC’s actuarial practice, the chatbot throws out questions like: “What skills do you think an actuarial consultant should have?” and “How would you explain actuarial concepts to a client who does not have a financial background?”. When a user answers a question, Prepper generates a score out of 100 and tells them which parts worked well and which parts were lacking.
Prepper is part of a new wave of chatbots powered by generative AI — from ChatGPT to Bard and Claude. Chatbots are trained on large chunks of text pulled from the Internet, including books, newspapers, blogs, videos, and image captions. They can create believable and complex text that is largely indistinguishable from human writing.
“In the last 12-18 months things have gone downhill,” says Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna. “Of course, it’s very hyped at the moment, but it has a lot of smart tools [to aid] recruitment and helps people find work more easily.’
AI is not a new tool in hiring and job hunting. Over the past decade, it has been used primarily to make processes more efficient and cheaper for employers, from searching for keywords in resumes to filtering candidate video interviews.
But generative AI tools rebalance the power dynamic toward candidates. “Many of the recent improvements we’ve seen in AI are on the candidate side,” says Thomas Chamorro-Premuzik, an organizational psychologist and recruiting technology expert. “A few years ago, recruiters pretended they were using AI to look cool, even if they weren’t. Now they pretend they don’t use AI.
When Chamorro-Premuzic recently tried to hire for a role, he asked a candidate if they had experimented with generative AI. “They said, ‘If it wasn’t for ChatGPT, I wouldn’t be standing in front of you right now.'” Their resume, cover letter and application were all written by AI.
Chamorro-Premuzic, who respected honesty and decided it was worth hiring someone who was technologically savvy, hired the man. Others are less enthusiastic, warning that AI could signal the end of the traditional job application process.
“Generative AI can create very good profiles – there may be a few mistakes, but only the individual will recognize them, not the employer,” says Matt Jones of recruitment technology company Cielo. “This raises the question of the appropriateness of reviewing CVs, cover letters and applications, particularly early in a career. I wonder if this is the death knell of autobiography.’
For graduates in an increasingly competitive job market, chatbots are a way to tackle a potentially overwhelming process. Ayushman Nath, a second-year student at the University of Cambridge, says many of his colleagues have been playing around with ChatGPT, the public chatbot launched by OpenAI backed by Microsoft, asking him to write cover letters for specific companies. He knows people who have passed early rounds or secured internships using cover letters and applications written by ChatGPT.
“From what I’ve experienced, it’s good for jumping over the initial barriers. The initial rounds of filtering are impersonal, they feel very distant and dehumanized. Everything is so automated,” Nat says of today’s recruiting processes.
Nat and his colleagues have also been subject to automated video interviews conducted by recruiting technology providers such as HireVue, which record candidates answering predetermined questions, usually with a time limit for each answer. Records are sometimes viewed by the employer’s hiring managers; or the platform’s AI algorithms will evaluate each candidate’s performance by looking for various keywords from the job description.
The company hasn’t released any generative AI products yet, but its chief data scientist, Lindsey Zuloaga, says her team is testing tools like chatbots for interview preparation and new ways to extract information from video interviews. “These systems are powerful, but they can also make mistakes. How can we apply it carefully and with an ethical focus?” she says.
Grace Lordon, an economist at the London School of Economics and director of The Inclusion Initiative, which studies diversity in the corporate environment, says companies, particularly technology groups, are experimenting with generative AI to conduct initial interviews.
“One of the biggest areas of bias is actually the interview,” she says. “This is when people-affinity bias, or representativeness bias, which means choosing people who look like others in the organization, comes into play.”
Interviews conducted with artificial intelligence could go some way to eliminating this bias, she says. “Generative AI is quite convincing as an avatar. Using AI as another serious data point will enable pushback from machines [against human bias].”
More employers are also using new assessment methods to expand the pool of candidates they hire from, amid global skills and labor shortages and as they push to improve diversity. Automated systems designed to hire a more diverse workforce can find candidates who might otherwise be overlooked because of health issues, employment gaps, or because they lack a degree or come from a non-traditional background.
But while ChatGPT is a useful starting point for a cover letter or researching a potential employer’s background, recruiters say it’s no substitute for writing an application yourself.
Nat, a student at the University of Cambridge, said: “Companies are looking for a connection with people out there, such as getting in touch with someone in the company or a piece of information that is not on the website. And these things can only be cultivated through personal interactions, not AI models.”
Adzuna’s Hunter agrees: “The caution I would give to job seekers is that AI can act as a good co-pilot, but don’t let the tech try to do everything for you. . . This is very nascent technology, it will spit out answers like a cookie cutter. If you let the initial interactions with the employer be entirely driven by AI, then you won’t be able to get the job done.