AI recruiters could be the unlikely solution to career catfishing, with job seekers admitting they’d rather interview with a bot

The career catfishing and ghosting loop 

AI interviewers are better than humans—but not everyone is buying in

Jessica Coacci is a reporting fellow at Fortune where she covers success. Prior to joining Fortune, she worked as a producer at CNN and CNBC.

Bosses fed up with candidate ghosting and combing through thousands of applications may have a new assistant for the gruelling selection process: using AI to interview the applicants. And the tools are benefiting job-seekers, too. 

Despite some unemployed professionals sharing their frustration with the tool, overall job-seekers say they prefer it to interviewing with a human, according to recent research

When given the choice, 78% of job applicants picked the AI interviewer over a real person recruiter. And the technology is even helping them land opportunities—applicants interviewed

Plus, the technology could be a solution for “career catfishing,” when applicants ghost their employers after interviewing for a job and accepting the role. Candidates screened

The reasoning for “career catfishing” varies; many point to frustrations with the hiring process, others are simply getting interview practice in, while some even admit they “just weren’t feeling it.” 

But it isn’t just applicants who are engaging in ghosting; it’s become a workplace norm on both sides. In fact, recruiters leaving job seekers in the dark after interviewing has gotten so bad that the Canadian government is taking legal action for applicants who are stuck sitting in radio silence.

A poll found that nine out of 10 workers say they’ve been ghosted

However, the study pointed out that allowing AI to provide evaluation scores to recruiters overrides human hiring decisions, influencing job acceptance rates and worker productivity. If recruiters are able to fish through hundreds of applications sooner, job candidates may have a higher chance of hearing back. 

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Why is AI winning at hiring? The researchers found that these tools were able to cover more ground in interviews because they’re able to cut through the fluff and get to the point and as a result, produce richer answers. Applicants who spoke to AI recruiters received job offers in 9.73% of cases, compared to 8.7% under human recruiters.

For younger job seekers, using a robot in an interview process may not be such an uncanny feeling. As entry-level professionals who started their careers during lockdown, most have lacked in-person professional connections and missed out on pivotal points of their work lives, with everything scheduled on Zoom. 

But while AI interviewers have proved to help job-seekers succeed in landing a role, not everyone is so accepting of the new technology. 

Candidates rated the interaction as less “natural” compared to talking with a human. In 7% of cases, the agent encountered technical issues. And about 5% of applicants even ended their interviews once they realized they were speaking with AI.