For both job seekers and employers, AI has already permeated almost every step of the hiring process, from evaluating resumes to writing cover letters.
The latest frontier is job interviews.
Rather than hopping on a phone or Zoom call with a human recruiter, candidates are increasingly being asked to speak with an AI interviewer as the first step in the hiring process.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of 2,950 active job seekers surveyed by Greenhouse, a hiring platform and applicant tracking system, say they have been interviewed by AI. That number grew 13% from the previous six months, according to the April 2026 report, which surveyed job seekers from the U.S., UK, Ireland, Germany and Australia.
Some AI interviewers are faceless bots that simply ask questions through audio or text. Others are humanlike avatars that can smile, blink and nod their heads — albeit in a slightly uncanny manner.
Either way, many candidates are struggling to adapt to the new technology, according to Katrina Kibben, a recruiting consultant and job post copywriter based in Rockford, Illinois.
Until recently, “telling someone you had an interview always meant there was a person on the other side that you were interacting with,” Kibben says. “Now we’ve removed that human, and people are wondering: did the rules change?”
Why employers are using AI interviews
One reason employers are adopting AI interviews is “because they’re getting more applications than they ever have,” Kibben says.
The number of U.S. applicants for each open role has doubled since spring 2022, according to research from LinkedIn published in January 2026.
Demand for AI hiring tools like AI interviewers has increased “pretty exponentially” in recent months, says Dina Taylor, chief evangelist at HireVue, a virtual interviewing, recruiting and hiring platform. HireVue debuted a voice-based AI interviewer in June 2026.
By deploying AI interviewers, companies are largely hoping to save money and time, according to Kathleen Nolan-Raygoza, a senior technical recruiter with almost a decade of experience. Nolan-Raygoza’s current employer does not use AI interviews in its hiring process.
Due to layoffs in recent years, hiring and recruiting teams also tend to be smaller, she says, which makes it “nearly impossible” for them to manually screen all applicants.
Human recruiters “don’t have the scale and the time to interview thousands of people in a week, whereas that’s really what the AI interviewer is designed to do,” according to Taylor.
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Still, an AI interview isn’t a one-to-one substitute for a human conversation. After submitting their application, an AI interview is often a candidate’s “very first interaction with the company,” Kibben says, and from a job seeker’s perspective, that approach can feel somewhat impersonal or even off-putting.
“It can be very jarring to hop on a call and either see a bot or an avatar,” Nolan-Raygoza says.
How an AI interview works
If you can get past the weirdness of speaking to a machine, AI interviews aren’t dramatically different from human-to-human interviews, according to Kibben.
The exact process varies based on which software program a company uses, but an AI interview typically starts with a brief introduction — at HireVue, a generic example script is, “The goals of this interview are to get a high-level understanding of your background, interest in this opportunity, and to confirm some basic requirements” — before launching into a series of questions based on the role description.
Afterwards, the software sends the hiring manager a transcript of the meeting and a personalized evaluation of the candidate, which can include a short summary of the conversation, a rubric scoring how well they match the job requirements, an assessment of the candidate’s interview performance and a final overall score or ranking.
Taylor emphasizes that the characteristics an AI interviewer screens for “are dependent on the company and the job,” she says. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.”
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Once they’ve reviewed the AI interviewer’s report, the hiring manager can decide which candidates will advance to the next round – which usually, in Kibben’s experience, involves a human-to-human conversation.
However, there are some areas in which AI interviewers can’t quite keep up with their human counterparts, recruiters say.
For one, many AI interview tools “really stink” at asking follow-up questions, says Kibben, so if a candidate doesn’t provide enough information in their initial answer, the AI interviewer won’t prompt them to elaborate like a human might.
AI interviewers can also struggle to comprehend normal conversational speech patterns, according to Nicole Kaiser, a technical and executive talent scout based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Kaiser’s employer does not currently use AI interviews, but she has tested the software.
If a candidate pauses for too long while answering a question, the AI bot will sometimes interrupt or “move you straight on to the next question without giving you the opportunity to think on it,” Kaiser says.
“It really does a bad job at the human element of the interview process,” she continues.
How it affects candidates
Job interviews can be nerve-wracking, Nolan-Raygoza says, but in a human-to-human conversation, the hirer can “break the ice and put the candidate at ease.”
Unfortunately, “AI interviewers are not able to do that,” she says.
The absence of “social and emotional” feedback in AI interviews can worsen performance anxiety for some candidates, according to Kibben.
In Nolan-Raygoza’s experience, job seekers are keenly attuned to an interviewer’s “micro expressions,” such as a smile or a nod, or a furrowed brow. Without saying a word, “I’m able to encourage them if they’re feeling a little bit lost on an answer, or they don’t have the most confidence, and that makes a huge difference,” she says.
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There are other uniquely human aspects of the interview process that AI can’t quite replicate, according to Nolan-Raygoza.
“It’s missing tone. It’s missing nuance. It’s missing the ability to say, “Can we go back to what you said?” she says. “It’s missing the benefit of the doubt, which I think is a very important thing for an interviewer to have.”
It’s also missing empathy. “Humans can say, ‘Oh, they were nervous. That’s why they showed up this way.’ A machine can’t provide that kind of context, and unfortunately, that often translates into a rejection,” Kibben says.
Many job seekers worry that AI interviewers may have built-in biases regarding race, ethnicity, age, gender or manner of speaking. According to the Greenhouse report, 29% of surveyed candidates say they want evidence that AI tools were audited for bias.
Accessibility is another concern. Some video-based AI interviewers ask candidates to maintain consistent eye contact, which can be particularly difficult for neurodivergent job seekers, according to Kaiser. She also notes that some AI interviewers struggle to understand different accents.
Because of these challenges, employers risk missing out on qualified applicants who simply aren’t well-suited to AI interviews, according to Kibben.
“We need to be considerate of building interview processes that actually screen the candidates for the job and what they need to know how to do, not for their ability to do the application.”
How to succeed in an AI interview
For candidates to successfully navigate an AI interview, “they’re going to use a lot of the same best practices from traditional interviews,” Kibben says:
“You just need to communicate about your experience in a slightly different way in an AI environment than you do with a person, because there’s not a person to fill in all of the gaps that you don’t mention explicitly.”
One of Kaiser’s top tips is to make sure you’re “enunciating clearly,” she says: “Even little changes in how you’re talking can make a big difference in whether or not the machine understands you.”
According to Kibben, the most common mistake that candidates make during AI interviews is being too vague: “Open-ended, unspecific answers are going to get you disqualified.”
Instead, Kibben’s advice is to start your answer with a “very, very clear yes or no.” If an AI interviewer asks whether you have experience using a certain software, you could open with something like, “Yes, I have used that software,” before going into more detail.
There’s “no need for nuance” in AI interviews, Kibben says: “Remember, it’s a bot on the other side.”