Job recruiters are facing an uncanny type of candidate today: the AI avatar.
These digital humans — which mirror a job applicant’s voice and likeness but are in reality an artificial alter — are showing up in first-round interviews, according to recruiters. Lana Kersanava is a Sydney-based recruiter who says these peculiar digital renders have appeared in some of her interviews over the last six months.
“At the beginning, it’s like you feel like something is off,” she told Semafor. “It looks very realistic.” But it’s not. After about five minutes spent listening to the avatar deliver an overly polished response to a series of questions, Kersanava ended the interview and disqualified the candidate.
In the three interviews Kersanava conducted with AI avatar applicants, the candidates had applied for English-speaking roles as non-native speakers, leaning on AI as a crutch for a lack of language proficiency.
But for some job candidates, using AI in the application process is a reaction to a system that’s grown more machine than human, as applicant tracking systems use AI to filter resumes, and recruiters lean on AI avatars to do some first-round interviews, too.