With more and more recruiters using artificial intelligence to find the ‘right’ candidate, here’s how you can beat the machine
Last spring, Lizzie Carlyle* found herself staring into a screen in a state of rising despair. With 20 years’ experience in her field, she had applied for a mid-senior-level role she was confident she could do, and after filling out the application, she had been invited to interview.
But the interview was not to be with the hiring manager, it was with an algorithm: a five-minute video assessment known as an “asynchronous interview”, which involves sitting in front of a computer and answering questions as they appear on the screen.
“I was a bit taken aback, to be honest – like, really? No one’s going to call me and have a chat? But I was in a redundancy position and not in a position to be too choosy, so I thought, I’ve just got to do it.” During the interview, which was done using artificial intelligence software from a company called Modern Hire, four competency-based questions appeared one by one on the screen, with roughly a minute to record each answer.
It was, she recalls, “absolutely hideous. It was obviously very depersonalised, and felt robotic and inauthentic. After you answer each question you get the option to retake the video – and of course, watching yourself is awful anyway, so I kept retaking them. It ended up taking a lot longer than five minutes.