Seminario A Brave New World of Recruitment: How Does the New Era of Job Interviews Impact Jobseekers and Employers?

Recent technological advancements are reshaping the pathways to employment, in part by changing how job interviews are conducted. Asynchronous interviews, in which job applicants submit answers to interview questions via an online platform without interacting with an interviewer, are replacing more traditional face-to-face job interviews. At the same time, AI algorithms are now widely used to assess these interviews. In this paper, we use a field experiment to comprehensively study how these new technologies affect job entry. Over 3,000 job applicants are randomized into asynchronous audio or video interviews, live online interviews and a control group. Their job interviews are then assessed by both professional recruiters and a commercial AI recruitment tool using by the majority of Fortune 100 companies. We find that asynchronous interviews cause a large decline in application continuation, including among the most qualified applicants, and that this decline is largest for women. A complimentary vignette experiment provides evidence that these differences are driven by perceptions about the competitiveness and fairness of the recruitment process. In terms of assessments, we find that the AI evaluation tool scores women and underrepresented racial minorities higher than human evaluators, while the opposite is true for male evaluators. We track our applicants’ labor market outcomes and find that the AI assessment tool predicts subsequent employment success substantially better than human recruiters, suggesting that AI captures soft skills and potential that humans overlook. In addition, we provide evidence that, unlike AI, human recruiter assessments suffer from multiple cognitive biases.