The interviewer asks you a question. You start reading a response generated by artificial intelligence from the side of your screen — maybe even using another app to make it appear your eyes are fixed on the camera.
It can feel like there are endless ways to dupe a hiring manager in a job interview — especially one that doesn’t involve meeting IRL. The internet is, of course, filled with posts about how people try to sneak past the difficult questions interviewers sometimes ask.
It all points to a hiring process that can be terrible for job seekers — and for employers.
Execs told Business Insider that to improve the hiring process, more conversations will need to be had about what constitutes cheating. Many employers will also need to better explain how the application process will unfold so fewer job seekers might be tempted to get sneaky.
“A lot of the efforts to cheat come from the fact that hiring is so broken. So you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, how do I get through? How do I get seen? How to get assessed fairly?'” Lindsey Zuloaga, chief data scientist at HireVue, told BI.
Is using AI during a job interview cheating?
Part of the problem now is that not everyone agrees on what’s unethical. There are easy calls, like having someone feed you answers during an interview. But what about a quick internet search to look something up? Or how about having an AI bot ingest a job description and toss out questions that could come up in an interview?
Zuloaga pointed to using chatbots to complete coding challenges as one example of a question without a clear answer.
“Customers have different views on whether using ChatGPT is even cheating or not,” she said, adding that, according to one line of thinking, “it’s just part of the developer’s toolbox now.”
Zuloaga said employers can take simple steps like defining what cheating means and what the expectations are.
“They can say, ‘Hey, we want to hear from the real you. Although tools like ChatGPT can be really useful in preparation for an interview, please speak from your own experience,'” she said.
Zuloaga said there isn’t a reliable way to detect when a candidate might be using generative AI, but that one tell might appear when a job seeker’s answers lack specifics.
“Are they speaking comfortably and fluidly about things that they actually did?” she said.
Genuine answers, Zuloaga said, usually involve candidates walking through their experiences and the problems that they’ve solved.
Employers are trying to fight cheating during interviews
Kirthiga Reddy is CEO of Virtualness, a startup that uses blockchain technology to authenticate certifications workers can earn through formal education or various boot camps.
She told BI that it’s often too easy for people to say in an interview that they have completed coursework or training on a subject and even slap a phony achievement onto their résumé.
Reddy, who previously worked as a managing director for India and South Asia at Facebook, said the cost of verifying workers’ credentials is high, both for employers and workers.
Virtualness, which launched in late 2023, hopes that by using technology to verify a worker’s credentials, employers can worry less about the risks of taking on people who don’t have the skills they claim or, worse, those who might have nefarious intentions. It can also help workers who have actually earned credentials stand out.
Reddy said that even if people who misrepresent themselves get caught, those with fake bona fides could have kept more honest job seekers from making it through the application process.
“You might have missed out on really great candidates or have included a bunch of candidates who you should not have included in that whole search process,” she said.
Why it might be tempting to cheat
Zuloaga said part of the push to cheat comes from job seekers’ exasperation over what can be an arduous process. That can include what feels like unending interviews.
Octavius A. Newman previously told BI he went through a dozen interviews for a role as a creative lead and didn’t get the job.
A drawn-out process isn’t necessarily helpful for either side, according to Jennifer Schielke, CEO of the staffing firm Summit Group Solutions and author of “Leading for Impact.”
She tells clients they should be ready to hire as soon as they advertise a role. As Schielke previously told BI, layoffs and lengthy job searches have left many people looking for work without a sense of security.
Ravin Jesuthasan, coauthor of “The Skills-Powered Organization” and global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, told BI that one challenge around hiring is that both sides are using AI more often.
Employers are using it in the hiring process, and candidates are using it to beef up their applications, help with interview prep, and even apply for jobs. And some, of course, are using it to cheat.
“It feels like this is an arms race that is just going to keep accelerating,” he said. “I’m not sure that there is an end in sight.”
