I applied for this role on LinkedIn and was surprised when I was contacted by an AI recruiter via text. The message itself was strange because the AI gave itself a female name and then said it would call me to gather more details regarding my application. I was also informed about the upcoming call via email shortly after I applied. However, the message didn't state the date or time it would call me which I found odd. So I had to respond to the text and ask for this information. The AI then responded back seconds later that it would call me “shortly" which again was quite ambiguous and unprofessional in my opinion since that could mean in 5 minutes or even in 30 minutes.
When I received the call a minute later, I realized that I was not going to be speaking to an actual human recruiter but rather an AI agent. I found this very annoying since it began asking me very generic questions about my previous work experience at a rapid pace. This didn't allow me to ask for clarification or additional information about the role nor was there an opportunity for the AI agent to ask for any clarification on anything I shared. It also asked me to answer “Yes" or “No" to some questions which is also a widely known technique used by scammers. Scammers then use a recording of you saying “Yes" when they take on your identity in speaking with a bank about a fraud alert they will trigger to claim they authorized charges to your credit card or bank account. The entire experience was surreal and very distracting while I attempted to answer the AI recruiter's questions as I kept wondering if this was some sort of scam.
As a result, I hung up mid-call and refused to answer any more questions as part of the screening process. I later confirmed that this was indeed a legitimate screening call for a legitimate role. However, if this is how companies plan on screening candidates they will likely not get many willing participants in the process as it creates a lot of suspicions about the legitimacy of the calls and whether a scammer is behind it. Also, the use of AI doesn't allow for a natural conversation about the role and prevents asking follow-up questions to each other. As a result, this adds additional steps to the entire interview process in order to accomplish what would normally occur in one call with a real human as it adds more work for the human recruiters as they must listen to these recorded responses before following up to get more information about the candidate's experience.
It's ironic that companies are relying on AI to save their company time and money, even though the entire experience ends up being quite counterproductive and inefficient for everyone involved.