WIRED AND HIRED

As recruitment teams are increasingly turning to elaborate AI-assisted screening techniques to find staff, Helen Coffey gets quizzed by an avatar and ponders the wider implications

- Helen Coffey

In hindsight, choosing to do a job interview during the first week back at work after the Christmas break may not have been my greatest ever idea. To paraphrase a favourite quote from cult Noughties sitcom Black Books, my brain feels like wet cake.

Sodden. Spongey. Disintegrating into a pile of mush as I try to focus on the screen in front of me.

Just before starting, I had mindlessly chomped my way through a comically oversized chocolate coin - purely because it was within arm's reach - leaving me feeling mildly sick. Were this a normal job interview, I might reference all of the above. Just in passing, you understand, infused with enough sardonic charm to break the ice and immediately get the interviewer on side.

There's no point in doing that today. My interviewer can't relate to being a bit sluggish and slow, post-Twixmas. He doesn't know what it feels like to sit in discomfort, waistband straining, because you followed up all that festive overeating by pounding the cut-price advent calendar chocolate. And it’s not just because he's a young, fresh-faced twenty-something who you can just tell hasn't been systematically adding Baileys instead of milk to his morning coffee for the past 10 days. No, the real reason my rapport-building jokes won't cut it is that my interviewer isn't, in fact, a real person.

The “man” deciding my fate - nameless but who I instantly dub “Carl” in my head, simply to feel some kind of connection with him - is actually an AI interface designed to look and sound like a human. Created by HR-tech firm TestGorilla for use by companies and recruiters to filter out the best candidates, he is nothing more than a soulless, if sophisticated, checklist of keywords and phrases, fronted by an avatar in the guise of a handsome, ethnically ambiguous youngster.