Most hiring teams say that AI interviews save time, reduce scheduling headaches, and create consistency across candidates. And honestly, none of that is wrong. But there’s another version of this story, one that shows up in the data, and it’s one that a lot of recruitment teams haven’t fully sat with yet.
Chelsea Jay, a career strategist and certified professional career coach, has spent more than a decade working with job seekers on the other side of the hiring process. She observes a specific blind spot: companies rolling out AI interviews at scale for entry-level roles, without stopping to ask how their youngest candidates actually feel about receiving one.
The answer, it turns out, is not great.
Two-thirds of Young Candidates Think It Might Be a Scam
A survey of 1,000 U.S. adults by ResumeCoach found that 67% of 18–24-year-olds associate an AI interview request with a potential job scam. Compared with other age groups, this is the highest suspicion rate. This is not the over-55s or people who didn’t grow up with smartphones. This is the youngest cohort in the workforce.
Twenty-four percent of these young candidates said they would rather refuse an AI interview outright and walk away from the role entirely. Another 49% said they’d go through with it, but only reluctantly, and only because they felt they had no better option.
Now think about that from a hiring perspective. Before a single question has been asked, a meaningful chunk of your applicant pool has either left or arrived in a defensive headspace. That’s not a small inefficiency. That’s a structural problem in how the process is being introduced.
The irony is obvious, right? These are digital natives. The assumption has always been that younger candidates would take to tech-driven hiring more naturally than older ones. But that assumption misses something. Deloitte’s 2024 Connected Consumer research found that Gen Z respondents were more than twice as likely as Boomers to have fallen for an online scam, had a social media account hacked, or had their identity stolen in the past year. This is a generation that has learned, through lived experience, to be suspicious of unexpected digital requests. An AI interview link, arriving cold mail from a company they’ve never spoken to, can look a lot like everything they’ve been conditioned to avoid.
What They’re Actually Worried About
When candidates were asked to name their biggest concern about AI interviews, 38% of young candidates pointed to the lack of human empathy. Not tech issues, not privacy. The absence of a real person.
That finding makes more sense when you think about where entry-level candidates actually are. They don’t have long track records. They can’t point to ten years of industry experience or a roster of senior titles. What they have, often the only thing they have, is the ability to walk into a room and make someone believe in them. The interview, for this group, isn’t just a formality. It’s their one real shot to make an impression that a resume alone can’t.
Chelsea puts it plainly: “AI interviews can be extremely difficult for this age range because entry-level employees often rely on their people skills to win over interviewers, especially when they lack the required amount of experience. Taking the human element away doesn’t allow them to show their drive and potential.”
She’s also pointed to something subtler, the message the format itself sends. She states that for many young professionals, the interview process is their opportunity to establish a connection. AI interviews accidentally communicate to applicants ‘we don’t have time to sit down with you’, and that’s a major turnoff to candidates today.
Rounding out the concerns: technical failures (26%), worry that an AI system won’t understand their answers properly (26%), feeling they aren’t worth a human’s time (24%), potential bias (18%), and data privacy (16%).
The Part That Should Give Hiring Teams Pause
Here’s the thing, though. Among the 30% of 18–24-year-olds who had actually completed an AI interview, 71% said the experience was positive. Only 12% called it negative.
The fear and the reality are completely out of step with each other. Candidates who go through the process tend to come out the other side fairly positive about it. They cite speed and lower pressure as the standout benefits, each mentioned by 26% of respondents. For a generation that deals with significant interview anxiety, a lower-stakes, self-paced format can genuinely work in their favour.
But most candidates never get there. They disengage before they even start.
What Actually Needs to Change
This isn’t an argument against AI interviews. The technology clearly works well enough once candidates are in it. What it’s an argument against is the cold, context-free way they’re typically introduced.
A short personalised note from a recruiter explaining what the process involves. A clear line about why AI is being used and what happens after. Basic transparency about who reviews the responses and how decisions get made. None of that requires a dramatic overhaul of the hiring process. It just requires treating candidates like people who deserve a little context before being handed off to an algorithm.
The companies quietly losing early-career applicants right now aren’t losing them because AI interviews are fundamentally broken. They’re losing them because the communication around those interviews is. That’s a fixable problem, and for organisations serious about building strong entry-level pipelines, fixing it is well overdue.
