AI Job Interviews Lead to Better Outcomes

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Narrator: Artificial intelligence increasingly helps guide decisions, from approving loans to screening job applicants. But what happens when AI starts running the process those decisions depend on? In hiring, that means conducting the interview itself. Can an AI interviewer screen candidates in a way that leads to better hiring matches than a human recruiter?

Brian Jabarian: In this paper, we are basically trying to understand what happens when you replace human interviewers by AI agents in the job of conducting job interviews. So there has been this huge interest of AI agents, how they can provide information to other humans to make a decision, but less so about what happens when AI collects information from humans. So the idea here was, is AI capable of screening the right skills during a job interview that are going to translate downstream as a better match?

Narrator: Carnegie Mellon’s Brian Jabarian, a former Chicago Booth principal researcher, and his coauthor partnered with a recruiting firm that was hiring for customer service positions. Seventy thousand candidates were randomly assigned to interview either with an AI agent or with a human recruiter. Candidates knew when they were speaking with AI, and final hiring decisions were always made by human recruiters reviewing the interview transcripts and audio.