When Candidates Use Generative AI for the Interview

Generative artificial intelligence is transforming how candidates prepare for interviews, making it more complicated for hiring managers to accurately assess their true expertise. By inputting role-specific details, organizational information, and their resumes into GenAI tools, candidates can prompt the technology to generate potential interview questions along with personalized answers. In fact, recruiters, consultants, and other job seekers widely recommend preparing for interviews in this way.

However, there is growing concern among hiring professionals that candidates using generative AI are gaming the interview process. Research suggests that GenAI use has a material influence on hiring decisions: In one recent study, candidates who used such tools to prepare received higher overall interview performance ratings compared with those who were unassisted by GenAI.

If generative AI helps candidates acquire new expertise or reinforce existing job-relevant knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs), it will contribute to their future performance. But if it produces polished, contextualized responses that candidates merely parrot during interviews, hiring managers may mistakenly attribute KSAOs to them that they don’t actually possess. In such instances, their interview performance will not translate to their future job performance.

What, then, can hiring managers do in the wake of generative AI to ensure that they are getting an accurate representation of candidates from their interviews? For many reasons, there is already a preference for in-person interviews, including the possibility that candidates can use transcription software during virtual interviews to feed questions into GenAI and produce answers in real time.

Strategically, interviewing in the age of AI also requires effective follow-up questions to uncover deeper indicators of genuine expertise. Can they explain how to do something, not just what to do? Do they know why something works? Do they know when, where, and for whom something is more effective? Have they considered other approaches? And are they aware of the drawbacks of their approach? Those types of questions can push potential hires to go beyond their rehearsed or surface-level answers.

Barriers to and Benefits of Follow-Up Questions

The best practices for designing and conducting behavior-based interviews are well established. These include conducting a job analysis to identify role-specific KSAOs, training interviewers on what to look for, and asking consistent questions across candidates.

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