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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- AI interviewers could bring companies higher-quality matches.
- Job offers increased by 12% and retention by 17% with AI interviews.
- However, an AI interviewer’s ROI depends on the market it’s deployed in.
AI could interview you for your next job, and it might conduct the interview better than a human. That’s the latest news from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which conducted a study–> of 67,000 job interviews to understand the role of AI in the hiring process.
AI-led interviews increased job offers by 12%, job starts by 18%, and 30-day retention by 17%, the study found.
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The study took place in the Philippines and employed an AI agent to conduct interviews for customer service representative jobs. Once a job applicant received a request for an interview, they were either assigned a human interviewer, an AI interviewer, or a choice of either. When given the choice, 78% of applicants preferred to be interviewed by AI.
The research authors suggested that AI-led interviews are more likely to be comprehensive, spanning the required topics and covering more areas on average compared with human-led interviews. They also found that AI-led interviews tend to reveal more “hiring-relevant” information from applicants.
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Applicants received slightly more job offers when interviewed by AI. An applicant interviewed by a human received a job offer in 8.7% of cases, but an applicant interviewed by an AI agent received a job offer in 9.73% of cases.
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“Overall, our experiment shows that AI voice agents not only match human recruiters in the complex task of conducting job interviews, but also deliver evidence of improved outcomes in several dimensions without damaging core operations,” wrote the authors of the study.
The study also examined the cost-competitiveness of deploying AI in hiring and found that its ROI is dependent on the market type it operates in.
“AI pays off fastest with higher human wages and lower AI price,” the authors wrote. In a low-income market with a higher AI price, AI is “never” cost-competitive.
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The study illustrates AI’s future role in the hiring process and its viability across markets and industries.
“This study may mark the beginning of a more clear-eyed phase in how companies approach their AI investments,” wrote Bloomberg’s Jo Constantz–>.
Artificial Intelligence
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