I got to experience this for the first time a few weeks ago, from HireVue, when interviewing for a technical program management role at Lumen.

It was a combination of 5-7 painfully common interview questions that I’ve been asked during basically every TPM interview: describe a complex program you worked on, describe a time when you had to overcome adversity, describe a time when you needed to problem solve your way out a situation, etc. After being presented with the question, you get 60 seconds to prepare before the video recording begins. If you mess up on your first video, you are provided the option to re-record your answer a second time, but no more. It wasn’t clear whether both videos were being saved and assessed, or if you were deducted assessment points for using the re-record feature.

Next, I was given a series of three timed “games” to play. The first was a collection of numbers that you needed to select in order to complete a series of math equations: like “? + ? = ?” with a collection of numbers that you could pick from to fill in the blanks. ( I managed to mess up here, not realizing that we needed to be selecting the appropriate numbers in a specific order when the order of operations mattered; the instructions only said “select the appropriate numbers” and didn’t explicitly say they needed to be chosen in-order. I only realized this after getting an answer wrong a few times, which certainly tanked my score. )

The second game was one of those “connect the pipes” puzzles where you slide tiles around a grid to create a contiguous line from a start point to an end point. There was a third game as well that I don’t remember.

35 minutes after the process was over, I received an automated response:

As a thank you, we have automatically analyzed your responses to share insight into your unique profile of competencies.

The “insights” were a bulleted list of LLM slop based on my interview responses, the complete contents of which are below:

Your Insights Thank you for your interest in Lumen and the time you took to complete your responses for Program Manager. We worked with a team of IO Psychologists to develop the interview questions and games you just completed to discover the unique competencies you possess. Scroll through to see your individual results.

“Working with People” describes how you approach building relationships and interacting with others in a work context.

• You communicate in a clear and convincing manner and are able to tailor your message to different audiences.
  • Keep in mind that others may get bogged down if you provide too much information at once—be sure to check for understanding!
• You understand how to organize and manage the time, resources, and efforts of yourself and others within the context of broader tasks, projects or situations.
  • Be sure to break down this information for others so they can also see the bigger picture and their role in it.
• You successfully build and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with others to strengthen your knowledge and effectiveness.
  • Continue to build on your relationships and proactively identify opportunities to connect with others.

“Work Style and Personality” describes the ways in which you prefer to interact with people and information to meet the demands of a work role.

• You tend to remain calm even in times of pressure and can cope well when others are upset.
  • Try to help others remain calm, and be sure to empathize where necessary. You are able to deliver on what is asked of you with high work standards.
  • Try to be open to situations that may not require you to be as thorough to balance your persistence with efficiency when necessary.
• You tend to be open to learning new information and finding ways to apply what you learn.
  • Try not to get too caught up in learning everything—sometimes following your intuition is best.

“Working with information” describes how you approach new problems, make sense of the world around you, and adapt to new challenges.

• You tend to isolate problem areas and use effective techniques to solve them.
  • Try not to get too caught up with details if time does not permit it.
• You are able to quickly switch between tasks.
  • Make use of your ability to adapt to changing demands and environments by engaging in diverse projects.
• You easily process and manipulate numerical information.
  • This is particularly useful when quickly making data-driven decisions. When communicating with others, include storytelling and visualization to explain numerical concepts.
• You are quickly able to problem solve your way through most situations.
• You may enjoy taking on new challenges and giving yourself a chance to shine!
• You have the capacity to readily process complex relationships in your mind.
  • Others may struggle to keep up, so make sure you take the time to explain and draw out your ideas for them.

Where did these results come from? Our team of experts develops scientifically validated assessments that evaluate skills needed for the job and help reduce bias. We generated text from the audio in your interview and evaluated it. This, in combination with the games you played, were used to discover your unique qualifications. Read through your report to see insights and results for each skill that would lead to success in this role.

Two days later I received another automated email saying “we’ve decided to pursue other candidates whose qualifications better align with the role.”

I’m not unsympathetic to the interests of hiring teams. I’ve been involved in many hiring decisions over the years. It truly is a laborious, time-consuming process for HR, hiring managers and teams performing interviews. I’m deeply aware of the need to devise innovative ways to make this process less painful for employers, and recorded video interviews do make a ton of sense! Rather than scheduling 30-60 minutes for each candidate, why not let me look at a bunch of people (video-dating style) and let me pick who I’d like to hear more from.

But, that being said, I found the entire experience as a candidate profoundly dehumanizing. I know these responses and game scores are not being assessed by human beings first – speech-to-text is turning my answers into LLM-consumable data, and my scores/rankings in the games portion was being included in the ranking as well. This embodies all the humanity of a slave having their teeth examined to assess value. The laughable “carrot” at the end of this stick is a series of LLM “insights”; platitudes of which I was already aware and, if the employer gave any credence to them, would have probably invited me in for an interview.

The vibes are absolute poison, and no employer who cares about their hiring candidate experience should use it.

I have ideas about how HireVue can make the process less miserable, but I’m not about to tell them for free.

I outright refuse to do them. If I’m talking to a hiring manager already and they say I have to do one I’ll tell them no, and I’ll withdraw via email if they ask me to do that, I tell them it’s demeaning. I’m more than happy to actually talk to a human, but I’m not going to sit in front of a webcam and act like that’s normal.

I’ve been out of a job twice in the last 3 years thanks to layoffs, and I found a job both times relatively soon (2-3 months), and didn’t feel like I needed to stoop to that. They are a wonderful red flag for companies I don’t want to be at.

As an aside, make sure to grow your network, I get more roles from referrals and friends now than I do from resumes. Every job you have make some friends, play the linkedin game, and keep in touch with them, just popping in to say hello. That will go farther than you would expect.

Who the fuck is this “we”? I ain’t doing shit!