JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Is there anything more stressful than a job interview? Well, how about a job interview conducted by AI? Like it or not, recruiting companies are actually starting to do this. The Indicator's Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong talked to a recruiter, an economist and, yes, an AI interviewer.
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WAILIN WONG: David Koch works for PSG Global Solutions, which specializes in recruiting. He has a metaphor for recruiting - a funnel.
DAVID KOCH: The funnel is essentially number of candidates going in and number of candidates actually being placed. Every step in the process, you lose people.
ADRIAN MA: So typically, PSG posts a job online, a bunch of people apply, and the ones that seem promising are contacted by a recruiter for an interview.
KOCH: It's one thing identifying talent. The next step is you have to get them on the phone.
MA: David says if a recruiter calls an applicant within one minute of applying, there's an 85% chance of them actually connecting. But if just 15 minutes go by, that connect rate drops to just 35%.
WONG: And that's why recruiters end up spending hours a day just dialing and redialing the same numbers.
KOCH: The amount of time they're spending just trying to connect and how much they actually talk to someone is crazy.
MA: And so what did they end up doing? They brought in a robot, of course.
ANNA: Is this a good time to talk?
MA: Yes, it is.
So this is their AI interview bot that they developed called Anna. And to show me how it worked, they had Anna interview me for a call center job.
ANNA: Could you think of any advice you might give to someone who is just starting out in this role?
MA: Have some empathy for what a person might be going through when they call.
ANNA: That's a great approach.
WONG: Anna said it was a good answer.
MA: Nailed it.
WONG: (Laughter) A-plus. So PSG Global has this new technology, and the problem was they didn't have the data to prove Anna could do the job as well as a human. So they turned to an economist at the University of Chicago named Brian Jabarian.
BRIAN JABARIAN: It took me three to four years, basically, in total, to find a firm willing to partner with me.
MA: Were there any companies that just, like, laughed in your face when you approached them with this idea?
JABARIAN: Well, most of them even didn't reply.
WONG: But then, PSG said yes because it really wanted to know what effect Anna would have on the recruiting process.
MA: Brian devised an experiment where job candidates were split into three randomly assigned groups. The first group would go through the normal interview process with a human. The second would be assigned to an interview with Anna. And the third would be given a choice, human or AI. Now, importantly, for all the job applicants, a human recruiter would still review the transcript or the audio from the interviews and make the actual decision of whether or not to offer a job. Brian says after running this experiment on some 70,000 interviewees...
JABARIAN: When given a choice, 78% of candidates choose to be interviewed by an AI voice agent.
MA: Brian says job applicants who interviewed with Anna were about half as likely to report feeling discriminated against based on their gender compared to those who interviewed with a human. Interestingly, women were also more likely than men to choose the AI over the human interview.
WONG: The surprises went even further. Brian also found that people who went through the AI interview process were 12% more likely to get a job offer and about 18% more likely to start and stay in the job for at least a month. Of course, the next obvious question is why?
JABARIAN: If you display a lot of, like, interactivity, you have a lot of back and forth or you display a high level of vocabulary richness, you increase your chances of getting a job offer.
MA: If a candidate used a lot of so-called back-channel cues like uh, mm-hmm, uh-huh, that decreased their chance of getting an offer. And here is the kicker. Candidates interviewed by Anna did better on all these measures compared to those interviewed by a human.
David Koch at PSG says they plan to roll Anna out in 80 countries and use it to recruit for a lot of different kinds of jobs. And while it will definitely mean the company hires fewer human recruiters, David says the ones who remain will get to spend more time on analytical tasks and a lot less time just dialing numbers.
Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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