Hiring with AI doesn't have to be so inhumane

Goldman Sachs received 315,126 applications for its 2024 internship. That same year, Google received over 3 million applications, and McKinsey got more than 1 million. Between 2014 and 2022, the Indian government received 220.5 million applications for central government jobs.

The sheer volume of job applications from various talent pools is too vast for human recruiters to manage effectively. Further, recruiters often struggle because many applicants exaggerate or misrepresent their skills, making it nearly impossible to assess candidates at scale. As a result, truly qualified and talented individuals often get lost in the crowd.

Approximately 88% of companies already use some form of AI for initial candidate screening. Despite widespread adoption, scepticism persists regarding AI’s effectiveness in recruitment. This is understandable given that traditional AI systems still largely rely on self-reported candidate information, making them susceptible to inaccuracies. What's more, these systems can also filter out highly qualified, high-skill candidates if their profiles don’t match the exact criteria specified in the job description.

To address these shortcomings, micro1 developed a fully conversational AI interviewer to accurately assess both technical and soft skills through a dynamic, real-time process. Unlike static resume screening or conventional automated tools that rely on historical data and keyword matching, this approach engages candidates directly to evaluate their genuine competencies for the applied role. Traditional hiring methods have long struggled with bias – studies show that candidates with identical resumes often receive different responses based on factors such as name, gender or educational background. For instance, Amazon once abandoned an AI hiring tool after discovering that it penalized resumes including the word “women’s”, highlighting how such systems can inadvertently perpetuate historical discrimination.

By shifting the focus from self-reported credentials to skills-based evaluation, the conversational interviewer minimizes the risk of favouring specific backgrounds while maintaining fairness and consistency. Its adaptive questioning, tailored to job-specific competencies, helps level the playing field for non-traditional candidates, career switchers, and underrepresented groups, ensuring that assessments reflect true potential rather than past hiring patterns.

Stanford researchers Emil Palikot, Ali Ansari, and Ada Aka conducted an experiment in collaboration with Nima Yazdani from the University of Southern California comparing two distinct recruitment methods to assess the effectiveness of this AI-driven recruitment approach. In the traditional method, a conventional automated system ranked resumes, and recruiters selected the top candidates for subsequent human-led interviews. In contrast, the AI-assisted approach required candidates to complete structured, AI-led interviews designed to evaluate both technical and soft skills, with only the top performers progressing to human interviews. Applicants were randomly assigned to either pipeline, and recruiters then selected top candidates based on either resume rankings or AI interview results.

The results were striking. Candidates who underwent AI-led interviews succeeded in subsequent human interviews at a significantly higher rate (53.12%) compared to candidates from the traditional resume screening group (28.57%). This demonstrates that AI-led interviews provide a highly effective initial filter, enabling recruiters to focus exclusively on candidates with verified competencies.

Moreover, the AI-led interviews underwent a quality assessment, where a dataset of transcripts from interviews conducted by both AI and human recruiters were blindly and independently reviewed based on two criteria: quality of interview questions and conversational dynamics. AI-led interviews consistently outperformed human-led interviews. Specifically, AI interviews showed significantly higher conversational quality and more relevant, well-structured questions than their human counterparts. Importantly, AI interviews exhibit a lower standard deviation in quality scores, ensuring higher consistency compared to human-led interviews, which in turn creates a fairer process for all candidates.

The analysis also found that the conversational AI approach particularly benefited younger candidates and those with fewer years of professional experience, while women also experienced a modest improvement in outcomes compared to the traditional hiring pipeline.

The impact of AI in recruitment extends beyond improving candidate selection accuracy. Our analysis of different hiring scenarios also showed that AI-assisted processes can lead to significant cost savings. In one representative scenario, using conversational AI in hiring led to an 87.64% reduction in financial costs compared to traditional methods. This was mainly because AI handled initial screenings, reduced manual workload and helped recruiters focus on the most qualified candidates, making interviews more efficient.

By using AI to assess candidate qualifications early in the process, companies can streamline recruitment by minimizing time spent on initial screenings and directing interview efforts toward the most promising candidates. This reduces costs, accelerates hiring timelines and creates a fairer process for candidates.

The key to the future of hiring lies in human-AI collaboration. Our experiment suggests that conversational AI serves as a highly effective initial filter, identifying candidates with the right skills while allowing recruiters to focus on more nuanced factors such as cultural fit, communication style, and problem-solving ability. Human oversight also helps refine AI-driven processes, ensuring fairness and mitigating potential biases. Rather than replacing recruiters, AI enhances their role by reducing repetitive screening tasks, making the hiring process more efficient and equitable.

Perhaps most tellingly, user reviews indicate candidates enjoy the process. Rather than submitting a resume into a black-box system and hoping for a response, they engage in a transparent, interactive process that evaluates them holistically.

Beyond evaluation, AI has the potential to reshape workforce planning, helping companies anticipate talent needs, identify skill gaps and recommend upskilling opportunities for employees. Organizations may also leverage AI-driven career matching, guiding candidates toward roles that align with their strengths and aspirations rather than just past experience.

As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, the focus must remain on ethical implementation and human oversight. Ensuring transparency, preventing bias and maintaining candidate trust will be critical in shaping AI-driven recruitment systems that are not just efficient but genuinely equitable.

AI will not replace human decision-making in hiring – it will augment it, making recruitment more strategic, inclusive and data-driven. Companies that embrace this evolution thoughtfully will attract better talent and build more diverse, dynamic and future-ready teams.