Christopher has become accustomed to jumping through the endless hoops of the modern job hunt. Like many government contractors, his work has dried up in the DOGE era. Over the past six months, he has applied to roughly 700 jobs; in the vast majority of cases, he’s heard nothing back.
Five of these applications have gone through “Riley,” an AI recruiter for the IT firm Everforth Apex Systems. The first time Riley reached out, Christopher was excited. It was June, and he had by then realized how difficult the job market was. (Christopher asked that WIRED use his first name as his job hunt continues.) A text from Riley felt like a rare opportunity to pitch himself, even if his interlocutor was virtual.
During his first call with Riley, Christopher answered questions about his work authorization and his professional background. Riley promised that, if Christopher met the qualifications, someone would be in touch. But a human recruiter never reached out. Nor did the AI agent—until a little over a week later, when Riley texted Christopher about “another opportunity.”
Christopher hoped he could improve upon his original interview. So he set up another call with the AI agent. Then again for another job. And another. None of the interviews resulted in any follow-up conversations or emails; he never even received an automated rejection text.
By the fifth time Riley texted him, Christopher had had enough. If the company was going to use AI, he reasoned, why shouldn’t he do the same?
Christopher typed a handful of sentences of background information into ChatGPT Voice and told it to stand in as “Christopher.” Then, Christopher says, when Riley called, “I just put them next to each other, and they just hit it off.”
The call lasted 10 minutes. Riley told ChatGPT it was “great talking to you.” ChatGPT said it appreciated “how clear and straightforward the process was.” During one particularly entertaining sequence, the bots tried to nail down a potential start date and got trapped in a circular conversation about “standard onboarding and background checks.” Riley promised that a recruiter would reach out if the application met the company’s qualifications, just as she had the other four times. Again, a recruiter never materialized. It was, as Christopher calls it, a “slop flywheel.”
“This is one synthetic persona giving slop data to another synthetic persona,” he says. “And all of the data is going—where? Nowhere.” The exercise was a mix of “mischievous fun” and frustration, Christopher says, as well as “a dismissal of ever wanting to work” with this company.
Everforth Apex Systems did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Though AI has seeped into every step of the job hunt for both applicants and recruiters, it has taken time to catch on in interviews. Voice AI is infamously tricky to pull off, as agents get tripped up by accents or “ums.” Behavior that would be second nature to a human—like not interrupting a candidate—turns into a “very, very difficult engineering problem,” according to Ophir Samson, the head of voice AI at recruitment platform Greenhouse. But recruiters, overwhelmed with the glut of applications, have increasingly turned to voice AI tools to screen candidates, with 63 percent of job seekers reporting they’ve encountered an AI interview, according to Greenhouse.
As recruiters turned to AI, so did applicants. Candidates using AI in the interview process has become so common that AI recruitment startups like Ribbon promise to help identify “overly scripted, AI-assisted, or coached” responses—just like those in Christopher’s experiment.
Now there are rumblings that bot-on-bot interviews aren’t duplicitous but a preview of things to come. In many ways, it’s the “next logical stage,” Mark Monaghan, vice president of organizational development at call center company IQor, tells WIRED,
That doesn’t mean he’s entirely happy about it. In Christopher’s case, Monaghan believes, the use of AI was more than justified.
“If you’re going to send a bot to me,” he says, “I’ll send a bot to you.”
After his fifth interview with no follow-up, Christopher decided to apply for one more Everforth Apex job. Perhaps, Christopher thought, the problem wasn’t AI. Maybe it was him. Maybe if Riley was able to speak to the company’s dream candidate, things would go differently. So he created a fake candidate, whom he called Don Dickner, packing a resumé to the brim with qualifications pulled from an open job posting.
After Christopher submitted the application, Riley immediately reached out. This time, the virtual recruiter spoke with ChatGPT—posing as Dickner—for 23 minutes. They discussed “sustainable operational improvement”; protecting “customer experience under volume pressure”; refusing to let “tribal knowledge drift.” ChatGPT had an answer for every question, and a personal anecdote for every qualification. As the interview wrapped up, ChatGPT said it had a “few more questions I’d like answered.”
“I appreciate it,” Riley responded. “Upon carefully reviewing your application, we will assess your qualifications for the position. Should you meet our criteria, a recruiter from Everforth Apex will reach out to schedule a brief conversation.”
Christopher never heard from Riley again.
