Tim Millard received an email in January inviting him to interview for a media relations role. Six months into his job search, he expected to speak to a person. Instead, he was told to record himself answering questions on camera.
Millard, a communications expert based in Atlanta, accepted the task. He cleared his living room and set up his laptop late at night. The company had not specified a time, so he treated it as an immediate chore. “What else was I going to do at 9:30 at night?” he asked WIRED.
The questions were standard. He was asked how he would pitch a story and how he would build relationships with local journalists. The process, however, was strange. Millard sat before his laptop as a question appeared on the screen. He had thirty seconds to think before the timer ended with a “ding!” and gave him two minutes to record his answer. “It felt so out of this world,” he said.
He received an automated rejection in March. That experience placed him in a trend reshaping the modern job search. Automated video interviews and artificial intelligence are becoming a larger part of recruitment, often occurring late at night.
Late-night interviews are common
Arsham Ghahramani, who co-founded Ribbon, a company making voice-AI recruitment software, noticed the trend almost immediately after launching the service. Data from more than 500 companies using the platform shows that 24 percent of AI interviews take place between 10 pm and 2 am local time. For manufacturing clients, that figure rises to 35 percent.
“This is a genuinely new option for people,” Ghahramani says. Many parents cannot spare 30 minutes until 10 pm. The same applies to hourly employees or workers tied up on a noisy factory floor or kitchen. “Some people are very constrained in their options of when they can interview and how they can interview.”
Ribbon is not the only platform seeing this shift. Hiring platform Greenhouse reports that roughly 15 to 20 percent of candidates interviewed by its voice agent now schedule an interview at night.
Applicants do not trust the technology
Ophir Samson became head of Greenhouse’s voice AI division when the company acquired his startup in May. He told WIRED that he does not believe artificial intelligence should replace human interviews. Applicants are currently extremely skeptical of the approach.
A Greenhouse survey in May found that nearly two-thirds of job applicants have been interviewed by an AI agent, a rise of 13 points over six months. Most people were not particularly excited by the change. Thirty-eight percent of American candidates told Greenhouse they withdrew from a hiring process rather than be interviewed by an AI. Another 12 percent said they would drop out if an AI interview was required.
A major stressor for applicants is the lack of transparency regarding how the footage will be used. Candidates worry about whether an AI can reject them outright for failing to use a specific buzzword.
While employers and services vary, the typical AI or automated video interview is evaluated using a rubric that changes from job to job. A welder might be asked about technical skills or certifications in a Ribbon interview, Ghahramani says, while a sales role might include an “enthusiasm” score. AI analyzes the footage to evaluate how well the candidate fits the rubric and assigns a score. The score is passed along to the recruiter, along with the interview footage. In reality, many of these interviews go unwatched by humans.
Samson describes Greenhouse’s approach as a résumé add-on. It is a tool to identify high-scoring candidates who would otherwise be lost in the volume of applications. He does not see the AI interview as a choice between human and robot, but as a choice between being ignored and improving the chance of actually speaking to a human interviewer in the next round.
“It’s a shitty time to be a candidate,” Samson says. “Your résumé goes into a black hole. You’re competing with thousands of candidates that are all using AI to write their résumés. So, good candidates can’t stand out.”
Millard’s experience
That assessment matches Millard’s experience. A year after losing his job, he is still searching. The process has been so emotionally devastating that it inspired Millard to write a one-man show, After Careful Consideration, which debuted at the Atlanta Fringe Festival in May.
When Millard signed on for his late-night interview in January, he was not marveling at the convenience. He just wanted to get “this godawful thing done.”
“In today’s job market,” Millard says, “it feels like if you are going to scream, you’re going to scream into the void. And nobody is going to hear you.”
