Many years ago, the content marketing team at HGS wrote a wonderful blog post about having a beer with a chatbot. The chatbot was a surprisingly engaging, witty, and articulate fellow. There was even a sequel piece a few months later. This was back in 2018, so the sheer power of AI as we know it today was barely hinted at in those days. AI chatbots have come a long way, or have they?

Nearly every department of a company can find a use case for deploying AI. Not content to merely use AI chatbots to screen resumes in the hunt for precious keywords (opting out of AI in favor of human eyes on your application was, alas, a brief trend), talent acquisition teams have begun deploying chatbots as job interviewers. Faceless voices and avatars backed by AI are increasingly being used in interviews. These autonomous interviewers are part of a wave of artificial intelligence known as “agentic AI,” in which AI agents are directed to act on their own to generate real-time conversations and build on responses.

The trend began, well intended enough, driven by tech start-ups that developed robot interviewers to help employers talk to more candidates and reduce the load on human recruiters.

But it doesn’t exactly work that way, at least not in my experience. Over the past few months, I’ve had two interviews with a chatbot – both experiences were negative. The AI interviewers are apparently trained to hear for certain responses, and when mine were different, the calls ended abruptly. I then received a generic rejection email; one was signed by the chatbot. Ouch.

Maybe I just haven’t met the right bot. The chatbots that interviewed me – these were from different companies, although both were for marketing leadership roles – frequently glitched and asked several questions in a row. I was given no time to answer.  The chatbots may not have been trained in open-ended questioning. Forget the opportunity to ask questions or seek clarification. The AI chatbot would just respond with variations on “oh that is a good question. We will have to get back to you on that.” These were transmit-only interviews that went nowhere.

My take? Deploying AI chatbots in the interview process is not ready for prime time. A company that doesn’t value your time enough to provide some human interaction doesn’t really want you there.