Two years ago, which is a lifetime or more ago in generative AI years, I wrote a post about the impact of large language models on job interviews. I concluded that post with:
So, perhaps there are offsetting benefits of AI on the job interview process, if the AI is being used by the employer. If AI leads to job interviews that are more effectively able to screen for high-quality job candidates, by reducing bias in the interview process, then that can be a good thing. The AI might also be better able to ask the searching questions that distinguish high-quality and low-quality job candidates.
Of course, that assumes that the AI is interviewing a human job candidate. What happens when a job candidate, being interviewed by an AI job interviewer, is being given real-time prompts on how to answer by an AI chatbot? Or, in a Zoom job interview, the job candidate simply replaces themselves with an avatar or a 'deep fake' video of themselves generated in real time, and using an AI-scripted voiceover. If it hasn't happened already, it is going to be happening soon. Will that be the death of the job interview as a screening tool? Time will tell.
Time has told, indeed. The Financial Times reported back in May (paywalled):
You can almost hear the howls of frustration from HR departments. Jobseekers have discovered artificial intelligence and they’re not afraid to use it. Employers have become snowed under by people using the new tools to churn out impersonal applications. Some applicants are using AI to bluff their way through online assessments, too...
So it should be no surprise that jobseekers have turned to new generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to speed up or “game” a process that already felt dehumanised. Videos have even appeared on TikTok in which people demonstrate how to use ChatGPT to provide answers to questions in asynchronous video interviews, which the applicant then simply reads out.
The problem here is that the online tools that employers have been using in recent years as a tool for screening job applicants, have suddenly become less effective due to generative AI. The issue is one of adverse selection, which my ECONS102 class covered last week.
Job applicants know their quality as a worker (how hard-working, conscientious, smart, etc. they are), but employers do not. Quality is private information. Faced with a lack of information about the quality of each job applicant, employers would assume that every job applicant is low quality. This is referred to as a pooling equilibrium (because all job applicants are pooled together and treated the same). Employers would offer low wages to each new hire, because they assume that the new hire is low quality. High quality job applicants don't want to be treated as if they are low quality and receive low wages, so they would reject any low wage offer, and stop applying for jobs. Only low-quality job applicants would be left in the market. The market would fail for high-quality job applicants.
Of course, employers have found ways to deal with this situation. When the uninformed party (the party that doesn't know the private information, which in this case is the employers) try to reveal the private information (about the quality of job applicants), economists call that screening. Screening in a job application setting will be effective if it accurately reveals the quality of the job applicant. In-person job interviews used to be used as a screening tool. More recently, as noted in the Financial Times article, employers have moved to more technological solutions, such as 'asynchronous video interviews'.
With the rise of generative AI, those new screening tools have suddenly become ineffective, because they can no longer distinguish the high-quality job applicants from low-quality job applicants who are using generative AI. Generative AI has broken the current approach to hiring. As the Financial Times article notes:
Some online assessments are, for now, less vulnerable to AI use, such as those that involve playing short games. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see the return of mass in-person test centres for technical skills assessments.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the return of in-person job interviews as well. Of course, smart glasses combined with real-time generative AI assistance may render even in-person methods of assessment vulnerable, if not now then certainly in the near future. The unfortunate outcome of all of this is that the market for high-quality job applicants will soon be failing, and no one (not employers, not high-quality job applicants, and not even low-quality job applicants) will benefit from that.
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