AI chatbots are coming for white-collar job interviews

When Bijo Thomas logged onto his computer for a job interview this spring, an AI chatbot named Sophie appeared on the screen.

Thomas, a 45-year-old tech professional from Austin, said Sophie resembled a real businesswoman from the neck up, with brown hair pulled back and a white top. She smiled, gestured, and asked follow-up questions during the 30-minute conversation.

"It was very realistic," said Thomas, who got the job — a senior AI solutions architect role at Experis, part of staffing giant ManpowerGroup — after two more interviews, both with humans. He started in May.

Employers have long used technology to help sort through large stacks of résumés. Now, some are going a step further by deploying AI chatbots to conduct early-stage job interviews.

This strategy, initially used mainly for high-volume, hourly hiring in industries such as retail and manufacturing, is gaining traction for full-time, white-collar roles below the director level. Experis, crypto platform Coinbase, automation software company Zapier, and others have quietly adopted it.

Whether these recruiting chatbots reduce human bias or alienate candidates is already a subject of debate — and at least partly why few employers have touted their reliance on the tech.

"The interview process is arguably the most human part of recruiting," said Kyle Lagunas, an HR tech industry analyst. Employers, he added, may be "concerned about optics."

For now, though, the message to applicants is clear: Be prepared to prove yourself to software before getting to meet a gatekeeper with a pulse.

'Hidden gems'

An April survey of nearly 3,000 active job seekers suggests interviews with AI chatbots are becoming a regular part of the hiring process, especially in the US.

Commissioned by the hiring software company Greenhouse, the survey found that 63% of US respondents had been interviewed by AI during the prior 12 months, compared with 57% of job seekers in Germany, 54% in Australia, 47% in the UK, and 36% in Ireland. Respondents weren't asked to identify the type of roles they were seeking.

Employers embracing AI-led interviews say the strategy lets them consider far more candidates than they could otherwise. That has become especially appealing as companies contend with a surge in résumés, fueled in part by AI tools that make it easier to apply en masse.

AI-led interviews are "going to continue to catch on," said Lagunas, who estimates that at least three dozen vendors are selling the technology to employers. Many are from startups such as Ribbon and CodeSignal, while others were developed by established firms like HireVue. Experis' Sophie was built in-house at ManpowerGroup.

The products can look different. Some appear as still images or moving avatars, while others are a disembodied voice. In general, they promise the same thing: a faster way to screen more applicants.

There are upsides for job seekers, too. They can schedule interviews with chatbots at any time, including on weekends and nights, and they may have a better shot at advancing than if vying for a select number of spots with a human recruiter.

Consider, for instance, that Coinbase receives about 1.5 million job applications a year, said L.J. Brock, the crypto platform's chief people officer.

"No matter how big my recruiting team is, no matter how hard we try, we can't get to 1.5 million people," he said.

Coinbase began rolling out an AI interviewer named Milo in August 2025 for many roles below the director level. Since then, Brock said, Coinbase has hired more than 240 people who were initially screened by Milo.

Zapier, whose software automates repetitive tasks, began experimenting with AI interviews this past fall after some job postings drew thousands of applicants within hours, said Tracy St.Dic, the company's global head of talent.

The technology has helped Zapier screen up to five times as many candidates as it normally would, she said, while about a third of those who advance to meeting a hiring manager would not have made it that far based on their application and résumé alone.

"I call these hidden gems," St.Dic said.

Fair or frustrating?

The rise of AI-led interviews is raising questions about fairness. Proponents say the technology can circumvent human bias, while critics fear that it could score candidates based on speech patterns, facial expressions, or other traits that may have little to do with job performance.

"We need to understand how to use them responsibly, and not just because the value proposition is strong," said Lagunas. "We've got to get it right."

The Greenhouse survey found that 38% of job seekers had walked away from a hiring process at least once because it included an AI-led interview, while another 12% said they would walk away, too, if required to participate in one.

The same report, however, suggests candidates do not necessarily see human interviewers as less biased. Among US respondents, 36% said they felt evaluated differently because of age in both AI-led and human interviews, while 27% said the same due to race or ethnicity.

Beyond concerns about fairness, AI-led interviews may also make the hiring process more transactional and leave candidates with fewer cues about how they performed, said JR Keller, a human resources professor at Cornell University.

"It's so opaque," he said. "Candidates in general don't feel like anybody cares about them as individuals."

Bye-bye, small talk

The process is not always fully automated. Some candidates first hear from a human recruiter, who asks them to complete an AI-led interview. Afterward, recruiters typically receive an assessment from the chatbot, often including a numerical score.

Recruiters who spoke to Business Insider said those outputs serve as a guide and that humans decide whether a candidate moves forward. Some said they will also review AI-generated summaries, video, or audio if need more context.

For job hunters, performing well in an AI-led interview requires a different approach, career advisors say. Tactics normally used to influence recruiters — such as adjusting answers based on body language and building rapport through small talk — no longer apply.

Alan Stein, CEO of a career-coaching firm and a former hiring manager at Google, Meta, and American Express, said clients used to tell him they had been asked to do an early-stage interview with a bot only a few times a year. Now, he hears it a few times a month.

Candidates should treat an AI-led interview as more than a screening formality, said Stein. Employers may be evaluating not only their qualifications, but also their ability to interact effectively with AI tools in general, a skill he said is likely to become increasingly important as the technology spreads.

"If your attitude is, 'I'm not going to play the AI game,' then you have to be prepared to stay on the sidelines," Stein said. "You need to adapt."