“Interviews are NOT real anymore.” So reads the opening caption of a TikTok posted in September, punctuated by the skull-and-crossbones emoji. In the video, a young woman interviews for a job on a video call. She has a smartphone propped up against her laptop screen, so she can read off the responses that an AI app has composed for her: “Um, yeah, so, one of my key strengths is my adaptability.” She’s got a point. Getting generative artificial intelligence to whisper into your ear during a job interview certainly counts as adaptable.
More clips from the same alleged job interview give the app a further showcase. “I prioritize clear communication and actively listen,” a woman says in one, as she reads from a phone instead of actively listening. Another such post, which has racked up 5.3 million views, is subtitled “My interviewer thought he caught me using Ai in our LIVE interview.” It shows the same potential boss from all the other videos asking her to share her screen and click through her browser tabs. After doing this, she resumes reading off her phone. “Little did he know,” the subtitle says.
AI-job-search anxiety has been growing for some time. In the past few years, employers started using AI to “read” and screen the thousands of résumés they may receive for each job posting; job searchers began to deluge HR departments (or at least their automated filters) with AI-generated applications; and companies began employing AI agents—fake people—to conduct their first-round interviews. Imagine eating a hearty breakfast, donning your best blazer, and discovering that you’ll be judged by a robo-recruiter.
By this spring, the arms race had advanced to the point where, apparently, applicants were using AI assistants to supply them with material for computer-programming interviews on Zoom. In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that AI is “forcing the return of the in-person job interview,” and that big firms such as Cisco and McKinsey have been urging hiring managers to meet with candidates in person at least once on account of the technology.
The letter of these reports suggest a simple story of innocence and malfeasance. Some HR companies have even described the phenomenon as “interview fraud,” attributing something akin to criminal intent to the job seekers who might pursue it. But the more I investigated and considered the circumstances, the less that label seemed appropriate. Something weirder is taking place. In the context of a tightening economy, employers have turned a powerful technology against their prospective employees. Who could blame the job seekers for retaliating?
Is a lot of “interview fraud” even really happening? TikTok seems to show a rising trend; posts depict job candidates—especially young ones afflicted by a difficult, AI-degraded job market—who have started using AI to game the interviews themselves. But on closer look, many of these videos are not documenting a scandal so much as wishing one into existence—and monetizing the result. For instance, the ones described above, with the woman who had her phone propped up against her laptop, were posted by an account called @applicationintel, which displays a bio that urges viewers to download an AI app called “AiApply.”
I found many others of this kind. An AI-interview-software company called LockedIn AI posts on TikTok about how to “Crush Any Job Interview” with its tools. Kazuyoshi Fujimoto, a young professional engineer with a side hustle as a “career expert,” has a series of posts with subtitles like “My brother is interviewing for a $469k engineer job using AI.” Fujimoto answered my request to talk for this story, but stopped responding when I followed up to ask whether any of his posts were staged.
The fact that AI-interviewing services are being pushed by TikTok influencers suggests that there is money to be made from this idea, and that these products’ customers are real. I wanted to see whether those customers were buying something useful. In one of his TikTok posts, Fujimoto recommends a tool he likes called Final Round AI, which “listens in real time” and “suggests killer responses.” I decided to sign up to see how it worked. (A basic subscription is free; one that allows unlimited live interviews and hides the app during screen sharing costs $96 a month.)
After opening the Final Round “Interview Copilot,” you have to tell it about the role for which you will be interviewing. By default, there are a few dozen options—and almost all of them are in software development or its orbit. I settled on “content writer” (ugh) as the closest match to what I’m doing here and started on a practice interview. I asked Final Round AI to supply me with an answer to this potential question: “If I assigned you a story on people using AI to cheat on job interviews, how would you approach that topic?”
It returned a lengthy, milquetoast answer that began, “First, I’d want to really understand the scope of the issue. How widespread is this? Are we talking about a few isolated incidents, or a growing trend? Also, I’d immediately flag the ethical considerations. This isn’t just about tech; it’s about fairness, integrity, and the future of work.” The entire thing was plausible in the way LLM responses often are; if an aspiring writer provided this response during a genuine interview, it wouldn’t be wrong so much as uninspired. It is the sound of a person performing the role of a job candidate, rather than one actually pursuing a job. (Final Round AI did not respond to my request to discuss its software for this story.)
Reading the app’s suggested interview response, and imagining myself actually delivering it with a straight face on a Zoom, brought to mind the opening scene from the 1990 film Joe Versus the Volcano, in which the title character arrives at work while his boss, Mr. Waturi, takes a phone call in the background. “I know he can get the job,” Mr. Waturi says into the handset. “But can he do the job?” Mr. Waturi repeats that sentence, varying his emphasis, over and over.
On its surface, Mr. Waturi’s question is a good one: A person can carry out the rituals of employability—assembling a good résumé, performing effectively at an interview, even carrying out a satisfactory test-case work assignment—and still be unable to produce useful results in the workplace. Today’s AI-interviewing tools would seem to make this problem worse: Now almost anyone can get the job, with automated help. Whether they can really do it is irrelevant. Just as students can now fake their way through school and college, what’s to stop them from cutting corners on their way into Meta or McKinsey?
But the film also makes clear that Mr. Waturi’s concern with job performance is vacuous. Joe’s dreary, squalid workplace, called American Panascope, is described as “Home of the Rectal Probe.” Given this backdrop of hostility toward the firm’s workers and its customers alike, Mr. Waturi’s incantation, I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?, comes across as bureaucratic nonsense, an exercise in the mere appearance of high standards. Joe, the defeated salaryman, takes all this in as he hangs his coat and hat: What would it even mean to do the job when the job is so meaningless?
This question reemerges in a twisted form today, when the same companies that worry over being duped by AI-assisted applicants would love to have a workforce that makes use of AI in lots of other ways. The people who use Final Round AI to get their software-engineering jobs might be superbly qualified, in fact, to do those jobs in just the way their bosses would prefer. And if consulting is an industry that steals your watch to tell you the time (as the classic line goes), then a junior consultant who used AI to fake his way into the role might well be on the road to make partner.
For some time now, workers—and especially young ones—have become ever more detached from their work lives. David Graeber called the roles they end up taking for lack of any better option “bullshit jobs.” Internet culture has more recently nicknamed them “email jobs”: work whose purpose is so cryptic, its effort detaches from motivations and outcomes, personal or professional. The Millennials who graduated into the Great Recession talked about LARPing their own jobs in order to reconcile this divide. Cheating on a job interview with AI feels like a realization of that vision: You are no longer a job candidate, but a person playing the role of one.
But wait, isn’t a junior-associate position at McKinsey or “a $469k engineer job” distinct from the sort of dead-end, bullshit job that produces so much workplace alienation? Yes and no. If you can land a role like that, certainly it may pay you well, and confer a degree of social status. But the pursuit of nearly every form of office job, even those that demand a particular credential and specific experience, has become a hellish ordeal. Candidates submit forms and résumés into LinkedIn or Workday, where they may be chewed up by AI processors and then consumed without response, or else advanced to interviews (which may also be conducted by AI). No matter who you are, the process of being considered for a job may be so terrible by now that any hidden edge in getting through it would be welcome.
Rewatching the AI-interview TikToks with new empathy for the young professionals who seek employment in today’s chaotic marketplace, I noticed a pattern I had previously overlooked: a realpolitik of resigned desperation. Some presented themselves as using AI to generate bespoke résumés in response to specific job postings, an act that now seems necessary to get around the AI filters that may perform first-round culling. One young woman offered tips for using AI to prepare for job interviews: Instead of buying an app that listens in and tells you what to say, she suggested using the technology to generate sample questions that you might be asked, so you can practice answering them. She titled the video, “How to use AI to pass ANY interview.”
This language struck me as both incisive and honest. Passing is a contemporary life philosophy, one adopted by habit rather than duplicity. Ironic detachment has moved well beyond LARPing a career. Now one simply attempts, against the odds, to luck into a career, or at least the appearance of one. Today, students might use AI to write college-entrance essays so that they can get into college, where they use AI to complete assignments on their way to degrees, so they can use AI to cash out those degrees in jobs, so they can use AI to carry out the duties of those jobs. The best one can do—the best one can hope for—is to get to the successive stage of the process by whatever means necessary and, once there, to figure out a way to progress to the next one. Fake it ’til you make it has given way to Fake it ’til you fake it.
Nobody has time to question, nor the power to change, this situation. You need to pay rent, and buy slop bowls, and stumble forward into the murk of tomorrow. So you read what the computer tells you to say when asked why you are passionate about enterprise B2B SaaS sales or social-media marketing. This is not an earnest question, but a gate erected between one thing and the next. Using whatever mechanisms you can to get ahead is not ignoble; it’s compulsory. If you can’t even get the job, how can you pretend to do it?
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