Does AI Help in Selecting New Hires?

An increasing number of employers use some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their employee hiring process.  As a result, some employers indicate that their hiring process has improved in areas such as retention.  Some believe that using AI reduces the chance of employment discrimination, but plaintiff groups indicate that AI hiring selection processes can also be discriminatory, even if that result was not intended.  A few state and/or local laws also require human input into any AI hiring program. 

In August, a study was released from the University of Chicago with findings about AI’s ability to predict strong job candidates.  The paper indicated that AI-led interviews resulted in 12% more job offers and a 17% higher rate of retention for at least the first month.  The paper found that AI voice agents covered significantly more key topics relative to human interviews, largely because the AI spoke less and prompted the interviewee to speak more.  Surprisingly, 70% of those applicants who offered feedback indicated that the AI interviews were a positive experience compared to those interviewed by humans, but around 5% of the applicants ended the call because they didn’t want to speak to a bot.  There were also technical difficulties in 7% of the cases, and applicants rated the AI voice agent as “less natural.”

Also, although candidates were able to schedule their interviews a bit faster with the AI voice agents, it took the human recruiters twice as much time to review the AI-led interview results.  The results were similar to an MIT study that found that AI voice agent directed recruiting resulted in no measurable returns.  A recent study concludes that the savings can vary depending on what kind of jobs are being filled, hiring volume, and how much a company pays its human recruiters.

This article is part of our October 2025 Newsletter. 

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