When the Interviewer Isn't Human
Bijo Thomas expected a normal video call. Instead, a digital avatar named Sophie greeted him — brown hair pulled back, a warm smile, gestures that felt almost natural. For thirty minutes, she asked him questions about his background as if she were any other recruiter. Thomas, a 45-year-old tech professional in Austin, walked away impressed by how convincing the experience felt. He went on to land the job — a senior AI solutions architect role at Experis — after two more rounds with actual humans.
Screening software isn't new to hiring, but companies are pushing the concept further now, letting AI chatbots run entire early-round interviews. What started as a tool for high-volume hourly jobs in retail and manufacturing has crept into white-collar hiring as well, with companies like Experis, Coinbase, and Zapier adopting it quietly — often without publicizing the fact, since many still view interviews as the most personal part of recruiting.
Why Employers Are Turning to Bots
The appeal is scale. Coinbase alone receives roughly 1.5 million applications a year — far more than any human team could realistically review. Since introducing its AI interviewer, Milo, in August 2025, the company says it has hired over 240 people who first went through that automated screen. Zapier had a similar experience: job posts that used to draw manageable interest started pulling in thousands of applicants within hours, prompting the company to test AI interviews last fall. The result, according to its head of talent, is that they can now screen roughly five times as many candidates, and about a third of those who make it to a human hiring manager wouldn't have gotten there through résumé screening alone.
A recent survey of nearly 3,000 job seekers, commissioned by hiring-software company Greenhouse, found that a majority of American applicants — 63% — had already faced an AI interview in the past year, with somewhat lower rates in Germany, Australia, the UK, and Ireland.
A Debate Over Fairness
Whether this actually reduces bias is contested. Supporters argue that software strips out the subjective judgments a tired or distracted human might make. Critics counter that an algorithm scoring tone of voice or facial expression could penalize traits that have nothing to do with job performance. Industry analysts describe this as unresolved territory — one where getting the implementation right matters as much as the technology's promise.
Interestingly, the same Greenhouse survey suggests candidates don't necessarily trust human interviewers more. Roughly a third of U.S. respondents felt they'd been judged differently because of their age in both AI and human interviews, and about a quarter said the same about race or ethnicity.
Still, plenty of candidates are turned off. More than a third of survey respondents said they'd abandoned a hiring process specifically because it involved an AI interview, and another one in eight said they'd do the same if forced into one. A Cornell HR professor pointed out that these interviews can feel colder and more transactional, leaving candidates with almost no sense of how they actually performed.
A New Kind of Interview Skill
The old playbook — reading a recruiter's body language, building rapport through casual conversation — doesn't translate to a chatbot. Career coaches say job seekers now need a different strategy entirely. One coach, a former hiring manager at Google, Meta, and American Express, said he used to hear about bot interviews only a handful of times a year from his clients. Now it comes up monthly. His advice: don't treat it as a throwaway formality. Employers may be quietly testing not just your qualifications, but how comfortable you are working with AI tools in general — a skill likely to matter more, not less, as the trend spreads.