There’s a video on TikTok that has, as of early June, been liked nearly 1 million times. In it, a man in a suit and tie smiles and raises his eyebrows in excitement at the camera. A caption over the video sets the viewer up: He’s landed an interview for his dream job, and then “this happens.”
The video cuts to a virtual interview starting on his laptop. “Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” a stilted female voice says. “Thank you so much for joining the interview today.”
The man’s brows furrow. He’s talking to a robot.
“For our first question, let’s circle back. Tell me about a time when — when when when when — let’s circle back. Tell me about a time when—,” the bot says, beginning a glitching question loop that gives the man no opportunity to respond or even know what sort of story he’s supposed to be telling. On the screen is a still photo of a woman in a chambray shirt smiling in front of a house.
Finally, after a cut, the bot wraps up: “Thank you so much for answering the questions. I got a lot of great information—”
“I didn’t get to answer a question,” the man says in confusion.
Taking the human out of HR
The man is Leo Humphries, a Houston-area student who recently acquired his Bachelor’s degree with a focus on radio and television broadcasting. The job was for a news reporter role at a local broadcast station, he said.
He happened to record the now-viral moment because he has a friend in HR and wanted to send the interview to her afterward for feedback on his skills, he told HR Dive. Instead, he seemed to capture the zeitgeist.
“What shocked me was how many people were in the comments saying, ‘This happened to me,’” Humphries said.
Some of the most-liked comments on the video indeed provide insight into how job seekers and people more broadly are feeling about the intrusion of artificial intelligence into parts of the recruitment process that normally belong to HR pros or hiring managers: “It’s so disrespectful to the applicants”; “Taking the HUMANS out of Human Resources is the worst corporate move ever”; and “If they don’t have the decency to interview you face to face, they aren’t worth your time.”
The interview chatbot phenomenon is just the latest AI workplace integration causing a backlash among workers and customers alike. Duolingo, a company widely loved for its fun social media presence and cute owl mascot, prompted a massive backlash when its CEO announced an “AI-first” strategy in April, for example. The backlash was so intense the brand deleted all its TikTok and Instagram posts.
As the glitching bot and “AI-first” backlashes demonstrate, employers may not fully understand the implications of embracing AI in its current form. An Orgvue survey of employers conducted recently found more than half of those who laid off workers with the intention of replacing them with AI regretted it. Further, a quarter of leaders said they didn’t know which roles would most benefit from AI.
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Some companies are bringing a “wild west” mentality to AI integration in the workplace.