This post was originally published on this site.
The first time Mimi Berger did a self-recorded video interview, it was for a server job at a Vancouver restaurant.
She sat down in front of her computer and clicked a link, and a question flashed onto her screen next to a timer counting down from 30. She knew her camera was recording as she answered the question.
“It felt super weird,” she said. “I felt super judged, because I was alone in front of the camera.”
Berger said she answered two more questions before the interview ended. She never heard back.
“I assume hundreds of people went to this self-recorded interview and I was one of them,” she said. “I felt screened out.”
Employers have increasingly turned to self-recorded interviews like Berger’s to screen candidates. They sign on to a website, answer questions that appear on their computers and then are screened by someone who watches the video.
Or, increasingly, by an artificial-intelligence bot.
Employers say the interviews help them screen larger numbers of applicants, faster. Banks, retail companies and some parts of Canada’s federal public service have picked up the practice.
But rights advocates say the process — especially with the AI element — raises concerns about bias against candidates based on race or neurodivergency.
While some job candidates describe the process as strange and impersonal, proponents say the self-recorded interview is here to stay.
The Utah-based human resources software company HireVue has become ubiquitous in the world of automated hiring. Its clients include Walmart, Deloitte and the Royal Bank of Canada.
“Hiring requires a lot of manual work; it’s very ripe for automation,” chief data scientist Lindsey Zuloaga said. “Sifting through resumés all day is like a horrible experience and it’s not very reliable.”
The problem increased as platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn and Workday made listings more accessible and employers were flooded with more resumés than they had the time or resources to consider, Zuloaga said.
Zuloaga said the software lets employers review applications remotely on their schedule, allowing them to consider more candidates quickly.
“Often you spend a lot of time applying and you never hear anything back, so we’re trying to speed this up for both parties,” she said.
She said the program is mostly used to screen candidates in the first round of interviews.
When the company was founded in 2004, it shipped job applicants webcams so they could record themselves answering a set of predetermined questions.
Evolving technology has simplified the process. The company’s popularity exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic. In its first 15 years, HireVue had conducted five million interviews.
Zuloaga estimates employers now use HireVue for one million interviews each month.
The company now has 1,150 customers, including about 400 in Canada.
HireVue’s interview process hasn’t changed much. Applicants open the program and are recorded answering a series of questions that show up on their screens. At employers’ discretion, candidates may get several attempts to answer each question.
Then, the video is sent to an employer — or AI — for review. The company also offers on-demand skill assessments, like coding tests.
“You don’t have to miss work — more than half of our interviews are taken outside of regular business hours,” she said. “People can do interviews whenever it’s convenient for them, and then it can be reviewed when it’s convenient.”
About a decade ago, HireVue started working on an AI tool that could score candidates’ responses. Zuloaga said the model was trained on a library of answers to interview questions, which are graded against strict criteria designed by industry experts that determine how well responses address a question and how much competency an answer demonstrates.
It converts the audio of a recorded interview to text and scores candidates based on how well they answered a question. Recruiters get to see how each candidate scored before determining who moves through the hiring process.
‘It may amplify the biases in our society’
HireVue tried using AI to analyze visual cues, like body language, from the videos, but removed the feature in 2021.
Zuloaga said HireVue found analyzing the content of candidates’ answers produced the best results.
HireVue is one of several software companies automating the hiring process. Moncton, New Brunswick-based hiring software company VidCruiter lists customers on its website including Global Affairs Canada, Sheridan College and the Australian government’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Employers have used AI to score resumés and CVs for years, said Gene Lee, associate data analytics and AI professor at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business.
“Many of the firms are getting so many resumés that it’s impossible to read them one by one,” Lee said. He added it’s also often less expensive for companies to pay a software program to do the first round of job screening.
Critics have raised concerns that AI screening programs may be disproportionately screening out members of marginalized groups.
Amazon scrapped its own AI-scored resumé hiring program in 2018 when it found the model — which was trained primarily on men’s resumes — discriminated against women.
“It may amplify the biases in our society,” Lee said. “But the reality is that the interviewers are not perfect people. They have their own unconscious biases and AI itself can learn from those biases.”
Lee said the bias of an AI-powered interview screening software depends on whether the data set it is trained on reflects any systemic issues — for example, if a company trains a model on a library of responses made by white people.
Back at HireVue, Zuloaga said the model is tested rigorously to ensure it does not disadvantage people based on factors including race, ethnicity and neurodivergence.
‘It was quite impersonal’
When Wei Chou, a Vancouver-based entrepreneur, started a logistics software company, he realized he didn’t have expertise hiring programmers. He turned to a coding assessment platform called Codility to help him screen employees.
“I didn’t have the resources to really look at every single one of them and have them code in front of me and observe their answers,” Chou said. “It let me interview eight to 10 potential programmers in the same amount of time as if I tried to interview two or three.”
He added the software brought to the hiring process the expertise of the programmers and software developers who trained it.
And while hundreds of employers are turning to interview software, job seekers have mixed opinions.
“Personally, I really liked it,” said Rebecca Beaton, a Vancouver-based career coach. She was asked to do a self-recorded job interview for a coaching position in the United States.
“I’m personally comfortable on video — I know a lot of people aren’t — because I do that a lot for my work. So I found it OK.”
She added she thought it was a much more efficient way to conduct first-round interviews.
“I hear from recruiters and hiring managers how crazy busy they are,” she said. “If you can do 20 pre-recorded video interviews when you could only have done three in person, that might actually be giving more qualified candidates a good shot.”
And it saved time for Beaton, too — instead of scheduling half an hour for a call, she could answer three questions on her own time.
“Maybe this will be something that’ll help the wacky, inefficient process that currently exists in the hiring space,” she said.
But other job seekers say they find the self-recorded interview disconcerting. Stephanie Lim said she encountered one while applying for a job at a B.C. school — she calls them “robo-interviews.”
“The process reminded me of VHS dating videos from the ’80s,” she said. “That’s how I felt when I was doing these recordings.”
Lim remembers sitting down at her computer and starting the interview. She said a two-minute timer appeared next to a question about intersectionality.
“It was quite impersonal to speak to really complicated issues to a screen where there’s no human feedback and interaction,” Lim said. “It was very awkward and did not feel like the appropriate format.”
Lim did not progress past the video interview round and instead accepted an offer at another Vancouver school.
“I would not say that I loved it,” she said. “It’s nice to imagine that it was more of an equitable process… but it didn’t feel that way.”