Miguel Santiago, a senior at Baruch College in Manhattan, is graduating soon and already considering his next move -- maybe to a job at Goldman Sachs or somewhere else in banking.
In at least six of his interviews, he's been questioned by a computer and not a live person.
“They’ve basically replaced the first round with the HireVue,” he said, referring to the video and artificial intelligence platform increasingly being used by employers for job interviews.
When a candidate applies to a job at a company that uses HireVue, they are asked to go on to the platform, allow use of their webcam and respond to interview questions on video. The candidate’s answers are recorded and then saved to the platform.
Santiago helped bring Goldman and Bank of America employees to his campus to discuss the HireVue process when he was events director for Baruch’s chapter of the Association of Latino Professionals for America.
“What they really want the students to know is that the camera that they’re speaking to when they’re answering the questions from HireVue, it’s just another person,” he said. The banking employees told him that a human would be reviewing the footage, he said.
But according to HireVue’s own advertising materials and recent reporting by The Washington Post, that’s not the only way employers use the platform. Employers can choose to have the recorded answers evaluated by artificial intelligence. If the proprietary technology that HireVue uses to evaluate the recordings concludes that a candidate does well in matching the demeanor, enthusiasm, facial expressions or word choice of current employees of the company, it recommends the candidate for the next round. If the candidate is judged by the software to be out of step, that candidate is not likely to move on.
Although colleges are ostensibly preparing students to enter the workforce, many institutions appear to be unfamiliar with or unprepared for this latest trend in the job market. Unilever, Atlanta Public Schools, Hilton Hotels and Resorts, and nearly 100 other employers now use HireVue, but little advice concerning HireVue interviews can be found on university websites.