Would you … like … to have … a … job?

As someone recently (and at length) on the job market, I have a keen interest in the recruiting process and the efforts by companies to improve it.

Is a robot interviewer an improvement?

Meet Tengai, the job interview robot who won’t judge you – BBC News

Huh.

So job interviewing is kind of crazy, largely because everyone along the line — from HR / “Talent Acquisition” to hiring managers to (if you are so unfortunate) the hiring manager’s boss is convinced that They Know How To Tell Who Is The Right Candidate.

But studies have shown that interviewers are actually pretty awful at picking out good candidates for the job — the criteria that interviewers use, beyond the questions asked, simply do not correlate with ultimate job success. Heck, I know that from my own hiring manager experience, and yet I would still resist any suggestion that I shouldn’t interview someone.

This creepy robot person … well, they have the advantage of skirting around extraneous issues — visual prejudices around dress or weight or race or other extraneous factors (recognized or not) — and first impressions that may or may not have anything to do with job success. And I now that I did video interviewing during my last j0b hunt that, while frustrating to me by not providing a conversational / interactive experience, might have eliminated some extraneous factors as well (or might not have, since I didn’t get those jobs).

A creepy robot may seem … well, inhuman and demeaning, but it’s not much worse than a written set of questions one is asked to respond to. And, honestly, also probably no worse than some of the utterly IT-clueless talent acquisition folk who interviewed me and were clearly going off of a script that they didn’t understand.

Bottom line, the whole job interview/acquisition model is deeply flawed, which anyone involved with it will tell you … but by the same token, nobody has any silver bullets to make it better, either.