By Ray A. Smith
"USA250: The Story of the World's Greatest Economy" is a yearlong WSJ series examining America's first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.
A glimpse of the job interview of the future: virtual-reality headsets that immerse you in the day-to-day of the job you're applying for; an interactive videogame that you win, or lose, on your ability to perform certain tasks; a virtual exam that tests your problem-solving prowess.
Ask any job applicant or manager about the hiring process today, and he or she will probably say the same thing: It's pretty much a crapshoot. In a survey of 2,200 U.S. hiring managers by staffing firm Robert Half last spring, nearly a third said they'd made a hiring mistake in just the past two years. Failing to accurately size up the candidate's skills or fit with the company's culture were the biggest reasons.
The idea among many hiring managers and technology experts is that if you take humans out of the equation -- and replace the early, flawed generations of technology assistance with more-advanced artificial-intelligence systems -- you'll get a vastly better sense of who's the best person for the role.
That's the hope, anyway.
The algorithm issue
The problems start well before prospective hires get to the interview stage. The online algorithms, or application tracking systems, that companies use to narrow the mass of applicants risk knocking out top talent early in the hiring process. And candidates' growing use of AI to craft applications means employers aren't necessarily shortlisting the best candidates, but those who present better, says Matthew Bidwell, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Then there are the unstructured interviews -- often stretched out over several rounds -- and clichéd questions like, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Gut instinct, rather than a standardized interviewing process, ultimately drives many hiring decisions, which Bidwell calls a "terrible predictor."
Some research, in fact, suggests interviews often aren't just useless -- they can undercut what useful information about job candidates there is. "How would you like to know that the surgeon working on you was selected only because he's a hunter or something like that?" says Jason Dana, who on July 1 will become a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania's master's program for behavioral and decision sciences. His research has found unstructured interviews lead to poor predictive accuracy.
More structure -- and games
More companies are moving to structured interviews, which generally feature a set of standardized questions on both hard or soft skills. Greenhouse, a hiring-software company, says that the structured-interview part of its interview business has taken off: Customers conducted 15 million structured interviews last year, up from nearly 500,000 in 2015. Greenhouse provides interview kits that include scorecards where employers can identify specific attributes they want to evaluate candidates on.
"The more we rely on the structure and the skills that we're assessing, the more effective the interview is at finding out who's good at the job, " says Greenhouse's chief executive officer, Daniel Chait.
Another potential solution is to use games to assess an applicant's skills. Richard N. Landers, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Minnesota, offers a hypothetical example of a company's hiring for a software sales role. The company asks applicants to participate in an online simulation, in which they are presented with the main points of contact at a target company -- the manager, chief financial officer and IT director. The applicants are given brief introductions on their backgrounds. The challenge: Two of the executives being pitched have raised some serious concerns about the product.
It then asks the applicant: What do you do?
An AI interface simulates each step the candidate, or player, must make, from booking travel for a client visit to responding to pressure from a sales manager. All the while, the game is measuring an array of hard and soft skills.
"The scenario is constructed to force the player to think critically and respond in such a way that the sale is made within seven days of simulated game time," says Landers.
Landers stresses that the design of the game is crucial to be a fair assessment. For instance, he says, "it turns out boys tend to play those kinds of games a lot more than girls, and that plays out when you're an adult, and men, on average, are going to have more skill in that kind of game than women will," Landers says. "So [the games] have to be engineered to avoid those kinds of problems."
More-exacting AI interviews
Expect AI-powered interviews to also become more routine. Unlike the rudimentary AI tools that screen candidates based on the use of certain words in résumés, the AI interviews offer companies much more data to work with, allowing them to zero in on the skills that actually matter, says Euan Cameron, chief executive officer of Willo, a job-candidate assessment platform.
LinkedIn has been testing AI interviews in an automated hiring agent product it offers to small businesses. Companies can invite top applicants for a short, AI--powered interview where the agent asks questions about the candidate's skills. These pre-interviews are faster and cheaper than flying potential candidates in, or having a human spend hours or days interviewing potential candidates.
The AI interview also improves companies' ability to identify candidates who are the right match more quickly, says Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's chief product officer. He says that is because the interviews can screen for top candidates based on objective questions focused on skills faster than a human spending time trying to determine whether each candidate has the capabilities to perform the job.
Another potential benefit of AI interviews is that they might not be as biased (read: human) as those done by a person. "I do like the idea that AI at least filters out some of the maybe personal biases that a lot of interviewers will bring with them to an interview," says Landers.
Immersive VR interviews
A little further in the future, Landers says, employers could shift to virtual-reality headsets to fully immerse job candidates in the simulations. A hospital hiring triage nurses, for example, could have candidates put on headsets that transport them to a simulated disaster site to see how they figure out who imminently needs attention.
"Do they actually notice what they're supposed to notice? Do they make the first steps they're supposed to take? All those options can be coded into those kinds of simulations," he says.
The cost of the hardware would have to come down to become more mainstream, Landers says. "So the bar is pretty high for VR to be worth it," he says.
But he adds: "Maybe the extra levels of immersion and fidelity can really get something out of understanding what that person would really do, not just what they say they would do."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 16, 2026 10:41 ET (14:41 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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