Job interviews are traumatic sufficient — however throw in a glitchy AI recruiter, and also you’ve acquired a full-blown digital nightmare.
TikTok consumer Ken @its_ken04 goes viral after her job interview at a Stretch Lab in Ohio spiraled into the weird when the AI interviewer, powered by startup Apriora, malfunctioned and repeated the phrase “vertical bar pilates” 14 instances in 25 seconds.
“I thought it was really creepy and I was freaked out,” she informed 404 Media in a current interview.
“I didn’t find it funny at all until I had posted it on TikTok, and the comments made me feel better,” she added.
“I was very shocked. I didn’t do anything to make it glitch, so this was very surprising.”
Apriora, a Y Combinator-backed startup, touts its AI platform as a solution to “hire 87% faster” and “interview 93% cheaper” by conducting a number of interviews concurrently utilizing bot recruiters.
However for Ken, the encounter was extra “Black Mirror” than breakthrough.
“It was genuinely so creepy and weird,” she captioned her viral Could 2 TikTok.
“Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!!” she continued. “It gave me the creeps so bad.”
The unsettling encounter struck a chord on TikTok, the place different customers shared their horror tales of AI-powered job hunts.
“A company tried to send me to an AI interview for an HR position … Why would I want to work HUMAN resources for a company that won’t even dignify me with human interaction???” one commenter wrote.
One other added, “I applied to a job today that had an AI interview and immediately closed the window, cause if they’re not taking the time to interview me, I’m not taking the time to try to work there.”
This isn’t the primary time AI’s takeover of the job market has left job seekers rattled.
As beforehand reported by The Put up, almost half of Gen Z job hunters say their levels have already been rendered ineffective by generative AI like ChatGPT.
In response to a report from Certainly final month per CIO Dive, 49% of Gen Z job seekers really feel their school schooling has misplaced worth within the workforce.
For millennials, it’s 34%, and for boomers, simply 20%.
As well as, almost half — 44% — of Gen Z school grads say they’ve been turned off by interviews that didn’t point out a wage vary, typically by flat-out ghosting the recruiter, in response to Monster’s 2025 State of the Graduate Report.
“I will just decline,” Ken mentioned bluntly to 404 Media. “If another company wants me to talk to AI, I’m not doing it again.”
