From handwritten CVs to AI avatars: the changing face of job interviews – Yahoo

Robin Machell wrote out an arm-achingly impressive 60 application letters on a typewriter before he got his first professional job interview.

The 70-year-old architect from Leeds, who qualified in 1981 after studying for seven years, tells me that this was standard. Some people, he says, would write out 100 cover letters and CVs by hand before they landed their first interview, a shock, one imagines, to the graduates who can fire off applications at the click of a button online nowadays.

A shock, too, would be what one of his interviewers – the senior architect, no less – was doing while he questioned Machell.

“He was smoking,” he says. “Which you just took on board as a matter of course.”

Job interviews today differ drastically from those in the past.

As well as applying online, candidates can expect to interview online too, with many – at least preliminary – conversations taking place virtually. A hangover from the Covid pandemic.

Artificial Intelligence, too, is now playing a key part. According to data from LinkedIn, 89pc of recruiters say they are planning to use more AI in the hiring process this year. Recruitment platform Test Gorilla has even invented AI avatars to conduct the interviews themselves.

Of course, if candidates do get to interview in person, they will often face stiff competition in the form of high-pressure group interviews with dozens of candidates, personality tests and even working partial shifts, often unpaid.

Indeed, one may argue that today’s jobseekers face an even more toxic atmosphere than Machell did in 1981, despite sitting, as he did, in cigarette fumes.

UK unemployment hit its highest rate in nearly five years at the end of 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics, reaching 5.2pc in the three months to December. Perhaps unsurprisingly, young people are the hardest hit – unemployment among those aged between 16 and 24 reached 16.1pc, the highest it’s been for more than 10 years.

Liam McDonald, 21, from Liverpool, is one such young jobseeker. McDonald is just coming to the end of his Master’s in engineering at Loughborough University and has recently been through the process of interviewing for his first professional job.

Of the 10 interviews he has had, three of them were online, with – essentially – no interviewer.

“They give you a pre-recorded prompt where they explain what the interview process will be like,” he explains. “And you just have to record your answers, essentially talking into the camera. It shows you your recording at the end and then you get a choice whether to refilm it or not.”

Another shot at answering a question? That sounds supportive, I posit, hopefully. McDonald isn’t so sure. “If you retake it then you can’t use the first attempt,” he clarifies. Much more of a gamble, then.

It transpires, too, that candidates are given just three minutes to record each answer before, according to McDonald, “it cuts itself off automatically”.

When I ask whether these pre-recorded interviews came before in-person meetings, McDonald can’t tell me. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I didn’t make it past that round of testing.”

He had, however, preliminary checks before these recorded interviews: psychometric assessments online and against the clock. The tests involved pattern recognition. “[I had to] remember numbers in a certain order and I had to repeat it back or repeat certain parts of the order,” he says.

In the end, such interview methods started to put him off the companies themselves. For one job, he adds, he didn’t prepare or research as thoroughly as he might have done once he found out they interviewed using pre-recorded responses.

“I really wasn’t a fan of it. I thought if I don’t get the job then I’m not too bothered,” says McDonald.

“I definitely missed the human connection. It feels a lot more awkward just looking at the camera and seeing yourself talk back. There’s no one on the other end to reassure you or give you feedback as to how you’re doing.”

While McDonald has faced a more obvious lack of humanity in his interviews, so too did his mother, Celia McDonald, 57, when she interviewed for her first professional job – also in architecture – back in 1989.

She was 21 at the time and newly qualified. She tells me that there were three men on the interview panel.

“Those days, women in architecture were rare,” she explains. Like Machell, McDonald had written out numerous application letters – she’d done hers by hand – and had sent them off to job adverts she’d found in architectural journals.

The interview itself, she recalls, was just half an hour long. “I had to show my portfolio with all my design work in it,” she says. “And we probably talked about what my opinions were about different architects.”

As it transpired, though, the man who would later become her boss had already made his decision.

“A year later, I was asked to sit in on an interview with another graduate,” McDonald says. On looking through his application before the interview, she came across the notes from her own interview, which only mentioned her race, the fact she was female and that she was “attractive”.

“That was it. No mention of skills, potential, or personality,” she says.

McDonald was shocked. “To me, it was like positive discrimination. They took me on because I fitted this image they wanted to give out, because I ticked so many boxes, not because of my skills.”

McDonald’s time with the company was coming to an end anyway but, still, she didn’t raise it with her boss. “I needed references,” she explains. “But I did tell a couple of other people in the office about it and they weren’t surprised at all.”

The experience has stayed with McDonald – who left architecture nearly a decade later and now runs a dog treats business – to this day. “You would never get away with interview notes like that now.”

But it’s not just handwritten application letters, cigarette smoke, and workplace discrimination that date both Machell and Celia McDonald’s interviews. They were also shown around the offices on the day of their meetings, and noted that they were busy, bustling and full places, arguably very different to the offices today’s graduates will experience given the prevalence of remote working.

Machell recalls walking past “drawing boards on bricks with T-squares” and architects in old-fashioned “drafting smocks”.

The offices felt, they say, like real places of work and glimpses into the worlds they were hoping to join. Quite a contrast to Liam McDonald’s pre-recorded answers.

Eloise Skinner, careers coach and psychotherapist, wonders whether the change in interviews is down to the people conducting them.

“With millennials moving up into management roles, there might be more of a sense of playfulness or emphasis on authenticity,” she posits, explaining, perhaps, why some candidates are subjected to competitive group interviews or quirky personality tests.

The fact that candidates can use AI to apply for jobs may also impact the questions they’re asked in interviews. “There might be a push to put candidates in positions where they wouldn’t be able to rely on the use of AI, which can result in strange interview (questions) or application-related tasks,” she adds.

Meanwhile, Karen Burke, a recruitment consultant at Jump IT Recruitment Solutions, says her company looks in the “rejected pile” when advertising jobs on LinkedIn.

“The algorithm often sifts out the candidates that are, in fact, a good fit for the company,” she says. “CVs don’t often show the real person and it takes a conversation to find that out, which is missing in so many of these scenarios.”

Happily, Liam McDonald does now have an engineering job, one that will see him move to Scotland. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, his successful interview was one that took place in person.

“I just had a nice chat with them about the workplace environment at the end of the interview,” he says.

While times – and, of course, hiring processes – have changed, one constant has remained: the desire for human connection. In the end, McDonald’s successful interview wasn’t so dissimilar to Machell’s – minus the cigarette smoke, of course.

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