AI-Powered Interviews

Interviews are the critical moment of truth in hiring. It’s where you move beyond resumes and get to truly get to know a candidate’s skills, personality, and potential fit.

But let’s be honest, it is easy to find yourself staring at a resume, drawing a blank on what the best questions to ask are.

Sure, we all have our “go-to” questions, but what if each interview also had a set of unique questions, to really understand the person we are thinking about hiring?

Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI isn’t here to replace interviewers, but to help them. Think of it as adding an incredibly powerful tool to your interviewer toolkit – a tool that can help you gain deeper insights from every candidate.

This article focuses on how you, the interviewer, can directly leverage AI in three key ways to conduct more effective and insightful interviews:

1. AI as Your Pre-Interview Resume Analyst: Unlock Key Insights in Seconds

Traditionally, interview preparation involves poring over resumes, highlighting key skills, and trying to organize a candidate’s career history. AI can streamline this process in a mater of seconds.

Imagine uploading a candidate’s resume into an AI-powered tool before the interview… in just moments you can have insights on:

• Skills Identification: AI can quickly scan the resume and pinpoint the candidate’s core skills, both technical and soft skills, related to the role and beyond. This allows you to instantly grasp their key competencies and areas of expertise.
• Experience Highlights and Gaps: AI can identify key achievements and responsibilities within each role, summarizing years of experience into digestible points. It can also highlight potential experience gaps or career transitions that might warrant further exploration during the interview.
• Contextual Understanding: Make sure to ask AI to analyze the context of the experience, understanding the industry, company size, and potential challenges associated with past jobs. This provides richer insights than just reading bullet points.
• Pre-Interview Prep Time Savings: By automating this initial analysis, AI frees up valuable interviewer prep time. Instead of spending 30 minutes dissecting a resume, you can spend 5 minutes with AI-powered insights and then dedicate the remaining time to strategizing your interview approach and focusing on the human interaction.

How to use it: Look for AI-powered resume analysis tools (many are integrated into applicant tracking systems or available as standalone solutions). Upload the resume just before the interview and quickly review the AI-generated summary and key insights to focus your attention effectively.

2. AI-Powered Question Generator: Asking the Right Questions, Every Time

Generic interview questions can yield generic answers. To really understand a candidate, you need to ask targeted, insightful questions that probe their specific experiences and skills.

AI can be your personal question-generating assistant.

Based on its analysis of the candidate’s resume, AI can:

• Suggest Tailored Questions: AI tools can generate a list of interview questions directly related to the candidate’s work history, projects, and skills. These aren’t generic questions; they are specifically designed to delve deeper into their unique profile.
• Focus on Behavioral Questions: Many AI question generators are designed to create behavioral interview questions – questions that explore how a candidate has acted in past situations. For example, instead of “Are you a team player?” AI might suggest: “Tell me about a time you had to collaborate with a difficult team member. How did you navigate that situation?”
• Prompt Deeper Probing: Beyond initial questions, some AI tools can even suggest follow-up questions based on potential candidate responses, helping you dig deeper into specific areas and uncover richer insights.
• Overcome Interviewer Bias: By suggesting a diverse range of questions focused on skills and experience, AI can help interviewers move away from relying on gut feelings or unconscious biases and focus on objective evaluation criteria.

How to use it: Utilize AI-powered question generation tools during your interview preparation phase. Review the AI-suggested questions, select the most relevant ones, and adapt them to your interview style. Use these AI-generated questions as a starting point to ensure you’re asking targeted and insightful inquiries.

3. AI as Your Real-Time Work Experience Summarizer: Stay Focused on the Conversation

During a live interview, it can be challenging to keep all the details of a candidate’s lengthy work history in mind while also focusing on the conversation and assessing their responses. AI can act as your real-time memory aid.

Imagine having an AI tool that:

• Provides Quick Role Summaries: As you discuss a past role on the candidate’s resume, AI can provide a concise summary of the key responsibilities, achievements, and skills associated with that role, right on your screen.
• Highlights Key Accomplishments: AI can quickly remind you of specific accomplishments mentioned in the resume for each role, ensuring you don’t miss important details and can follow up appropriately.
• Tracks Experience Chronologically: Especially for candidates with complex career paths, AI can help you keep track of their experience in chronological order, ensuring you understand the flow of their career and how their skills have evolved.
• Reduces Cognitive Load: By handling the task of remembering and summarizing work history details, AI frees up your cognitive capacity to focus on truly listening to the candidate, observing their non-verbal cues, and formulating thoughtful follow-up questions.

How to use it: Some interview platforms are beginning to integrate real-time AI assistance. Explore these platforms or look for tools that can run discreetly in the background during a virtual interview, providing you with on-screen summaries and key points as you navigate the resume with the candidate.

AI: Your Partner in Smarter Interviews, Not Your Replacement

It’s crucial to remember that AI is a tool to enhance, not replace, the human element of interviewing. AI can’t assess cultural fit, gauge emotional intelligence, or truly understand the nuances of human motivation in the same way a skilled interviewer can.

However, by embracing these AI-powered tools, interviewers can:

• Conduct more efficient and effective interviews.
• Ask more targeted and insightful questions.
• Gain deeper understanding of candidate experience.
• Reduce bias and improve objectivity.
• Ultimately, make better hiring decisions.

The future of interviewing is becoming increasingly AI-augmented. By equipping yourself with these smart tools, you’ll be not just an interviewer, but an AI-powered interviewer – ready to unlock the full potential of every candidate you meet and build stronger, more successful teams.