If you do this in an interview, you probably won’t get the job
There is something very strange happening in interviews these days and it is pretty well a sure-fire way to ensure you will never get the job.
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Job interviews used to be make or break situations where a potential employer could put you under the microscope and test your chops in unfamiliar territory.
You’d have to think about the clothes you wore and whether you smelt like a manky rag.
Brushing your teeth wouldn’t go astray, either.
The interviewer always had the upper hand and you had to be at the top of your game, like an exam – until now.
Many interviews are now conducted online, meaning the boss can’t smell if you’ve showered that morning or, crucially, see what you’re doing off camera.
Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’ll find myriad videos of people in remote job interviews using artificial intelligence bots, such as ChatGPT, to answer their interview questions for them.
They load up another device, say a mobile phone, put it next to the computer’s speaker and the AI bot listens to the interviewer’s questions – almost instantaneously providing intelligent-sounding answers that they can read out.
Employers have started to notice this.
The Sydney Morning Heraldrecently published a story with big Australian companies, including Lendlease and Canva, saying they were seeing strange behaviour during the interview process that indicated candidates were using AI tools and trying to avoid detection.
Athletes have long had performance enhancing drugs – and now desk jockeys have performance enhancing technology.
It may be true that AI is increasingly used in office situations but that doesn’t mean you should be using it to get yourself the job.
We all know the mantra “fake it till you make it” but this puts a whole new complexion on it.
The problem is threefold.
This ain’t the job for you
First, if you can’t get through a job interview without using AI to answer your questions then it may not be the job for you.
An employer, you would imagine, is looking for someone who actually understands the job for which they are being interviewed.
No one, I think, has ever completed a perfect interview – there is always a curveball question or something you later wish you had answered differently.
But the whole point of the interview is to demonstrate your skills and knowledge and whether or not you’d be able to get along with your potential bosses and workmates.
If they wanted to interview an AI bot, they’d just get the AI bot to do the job – which I will come back to in a moment.
We don’t run the computers, they run us
The second point is that it proves how totally reliant we have become upon technology.
Many of us have experienced that pang of anxiety when you slip your hand into your pocket expecting to find your smartphone and realise it’s not there.
Part of that might be because it’s an expensive bit of kit but it’s mostly because you can’t imagine how you’d get anything done without it.
The relief is palpable when you retrace your steps and find you left your phone at the table – or worse, realise it was actually in your jacket pocket the whole time (I do that constantly). But pause to think what that means about your attachment to technology.
Our whole lives are contained in these things. We can’t bear the thought of not being able to answer any random question immediately.
How will I ever get from this restaurant to the next bar if my phone battery is at five per cent and I can’t look up the address? What if I can’t text my mates to tell them I’m going to be late?
Once upon a time you had to ask someone for directions or keep walking till you found what you were looking for.
If you needed to get hold of someone you’d have to look for a pay phone and hope they picked up. Such uncertainty is now foreign and uncomfortable.
That lack of certainty is now so trepidatious that people can’t get through a job interview without accepting some things are just up to fate. People once lived quite comfortably – and arguably more peacefully – in an analog world but we can no longer fathom doing anything without technological assistance.
In some ways, it makes us dumber.
If you need AI to do your job, then AI can do your job
This is the most concerning aspect of it all.
If you need AI to get through a job interview then there’s a good chance that AI will soon be able to do your job in its entirety.
AI is constantly learning and the more you use it, the more knowledge it takes from you.
Just as employers are themselves using AI to perform part of the interview process now, they will ultimately use it for everything.
If employers can see that you rely on AI to get through an interview, they’ll soon be working out how to circumvent the interview process altogether, cut out the middle man, and employ the real brains of the operation – the AI bot.
It’s all good and well when you think it’s just a tool but it will eventually become the robot that takes your job.
That would be all fine and dandy if it only took the jobs of those who need AI to get through their interviews but it will eventually come for all of us whose only work with our hands involves a keyboard.
Much like people who want to work from home all the time are begging for their jobs to be sent offshore, people who use AI to get through job interviews are begging for their jobs to be farmed out to AI.
The one advantage you have as a person in an office is that you are real and human. The more you show you are not the one-stop-shop, the more employers will look elsewhere.
Your bosses will get richer and you’ll be out of a job – and then we’ll all be left wondering where it all went wrong.
You might think AI is your friend but it is not. Just as you’d cut ties with a mate who was undermining you in the workplace, you should also cut ties with AI.
Mark my words. It is coming for you.
Originally published as If you do this in an interview, you probably won’t get the job
