Hated interview questions getting AI makeover
If Gen Z believes they can network effectively without ever meeting in person, and people are comfortable using robots to inform their professional development, maybe it’s finally time for hiring managers to let AI take over asking interview questions. Particularly those dreaded questions like “What’s your biggest weakness?”
That’s what Modern Hire, a platform for video interviewing and pre-hire assessments, is betting on with the launch of Automated Interview Creator (AIC). Mike Hudy, chief science officer at Modern Hire, said the tool was developed by a team of Industrial-Occupational (I-O) psychologists, who created a library of questions meant to hone in on what a candidate needs to be successful in the position.
On the surface, the questions generated by the tool don’t look all that different from those in a standard behavioral interview. For example:
Describe a difficult decision you had to make at work. What did you consider? How did you move forward? What was the outcome?
Describe a situation when you had a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time. How did you ensure everything got done?
Give an example of a complex problem you have had to solve in the last six months. How did you approach it? What was difficult? What was the solution?
The difference, according to Hudy, is that AIC is meant to work in tandem with Modern Hire’s Automated Interview Scoring
(AIS). This is an on-demand video interview feature in which the candidate answers questions and the AI evaluates and scores their replies.
This functionality was also developed by the company’s team of psychologists who, Hudy said, are trained to be unbiased and to score replies based on science. Their rating system is augmented by natural language processing. The result is that the AIS is able to evaluate candidate responses both accurately and without bias. Only transcripts of the responses are uploaded to the tool, so people’s identifying characteristics are not visible, he said.
AIC just came out of a six-month beta test with eight companies. Hudy said it’s an add-on to an interview tech subscription and is priced as a fixed fee based on the number of employees. The timing couldn’t be better, he said, as many companies are struggling to fill large numbers of open positions, and human interviewers can’t move through the process with speed. For some types of roles, he said, the time-to-hire has been reduced from weeks to days.
But the tool is designed to get at core competencies and the behaviors it takes to perform well in a specific role, Hudy said. It “enables higher-quality hiring decisions, essential for organizations looking to gain an edge.”