Looking for work is already arduous enough — but for one job-seeker, the process became something out of a deleted “Black Mirror” scene when the AI recruiter she was paired with went veritably insane.
In a buckwild TikTok video, the job-seeker is seen suffering for nearly 30 seconds as the AI recruiter barked the term “vertical bar pilates” at her no fewer than 14 times, often slurring its words or mixing up letters along the way.
@its_ken04 It was genuinely so creepy and weird. Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!! It gave me the creeps so bad #fyp
♬ original sound – Its Ken 🤍
The incident — and the way it affected the young woman who endured it — is a startling example not only of where America’s abysmal labor market is at, but also of how ill-conceived this sort of AI “outsourcing” has become.
Though she looks nonplussed on her interview screen, the TikToker who goes by Ken told 404 Media that she was pretty perturbed by the incident, which occurred during her first (and only) interview with a Stretch Lab fitness studio in Ohio.
“I thought it was really creepy and I was freaked out,” the college-aged creator told the website. “I was very shocked, I didn’t do anything to make it glitch so this was very surprising.”
As 404 discovered, the glitchy recruiter-bot was hosted by a Y Combinator-backed startup called Apriora, which claims to help companies “hire 87 percent faster” and “interview 93 percent cheaper” because multiple candidates can be interviewed simultaneously.
In a 2024 interview with Forbes, Apriora cofounder Aaron Wang attested that job-seekers “prefer interviewing with AI in many cases, since knowing the interviewer is AI helps to reduce interviewing anxiety, allowing job seekers to perform at their best.”
That’s definitely not the case for Ken, who said she would “never go through this process again.”
“If another company wants me to talk to AI,” she told 404, “I will just decline.”
Commenters on her now-viral TikTok seem to agree as well.
“This is the rudest thing a company could ever do,” one user wrote. “We need to start withdrawing applications folks.”
Others still pointed out the elephant in the room: that recruiting used to be a skilled trade done by human workers.
“Lazy, greedy and arrogant,” another person commented. “AI interviews just show me they don’t care about workers from the get go. This used to be an actual human’s job.”
Though Apriora didn’t respond to 404‘s requests for comment, Ken, at least, has gotten the last word in the way only a Gen Z-er could.
“This was the first meeting [with the company] ever,” she told 404. “I guess I was supposed to earn my right to speak to a human.”
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