Robotic Interviews

Anthony LoPinto

With the unemployment rate at an all-time low of 3.7% companies are struggling to find candidates for tens of thousands of jobs. The almost full employment condition intersects with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that is smart enough to conduct an interview. Major companies such as laboratory-test provider Quest Diagnostics Inc., hospital operator HCA Healthcare Inc. and insurer Allstate Insurance Co. use robotic interviews for some hiring, as do retailers, restaurant chains and law firms. At the more sophisticated level, some Fortune 500 companies are using tools that deploy artificial intelligence to weed out job applicants, using robot video interviews that look under the hood and take a deeper dive assessing human behavior, evaluating human expressions, voices and turn them into data that is assessed by increasing sophisticated algorithms. These hiring technologies are powerful and scary tools, but they are here to stay, so get used to it because your next interview may be with Watson.