Job hunting can be a dehumanizing, demoralizing experience even if you’re interacting with an empathetic recruiter on the other end. For the 1.7 million people slogging through long-term unemployment in the U.S., the process is grueling at best. Add to this the advent of AI-generated recruiter avatars that glitch out on you before you even speak to a real person at the company you’re trying to work for, and now you’re truly in hell.
This week, TikTok user @its_ken04, who goes by Ken, posted a recording she took of 25 seconds of the “interview” that’s now viral on TikTok. In the video, the avatar says “vertical bar pilates” 14 times in a row, occasionally tripping over the words or stuttering, while Ken stares at the screen unamused.
@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 🤍
Ken told me the company told her ahead of time that AI would be used in the application process, and that the platform was called Apriora. She was applying for a job at a Stretch Lab location near Columbus, Ohio, she said.
“This was the first meeting ever,” she said. “I guess I was supposed to earn my right to speak to a human lol.”
Apriora, founded in 2023 by John Rytel and Aaron Wang, is a Y Combinator startup that promises to help companies “hire 87% faster” and “interview 93% cheaper” because it can interview multiple candidates at once.
“By interviewing more candidates with Apriora’s AI, employers can widen their talent aperture and identify qualified applicants from non-traditional backgrounds that may have otherwise been screened out of the hiring process,” Wang told Forbes in 2024. “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 wasn’t Ken’s experience. “I thought it was really creepy and I was freaked out,” she said. “I didn’t find it funny at all until I had posted it on TikTok and the comments made me feel better. I was very shocked, I didn’t do anything to make it glitch so this was very surprising. I would never go through this process ever again. If another company wants me to talk to AI I will just decline.”
Almost all of the more than 3,100 comments on her video agree: “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,” one said. “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???” another wrote.
The recruitment and talent acquisition industry has been hemorrhaging for years now, as companies slow hiring in an economic downturn. “Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees in 2022 announcing that the company would lay off more than 11,000 people. Of that number, Meta reportedly marked around 1,500 recruiters and HR roles for cuts. Google eliminated hundreds of recruitment roles in 2023.
Even as so many people need and are looking for jobs, companies are making it harder and weirder to try to get one. Last year, Emanuel wrote about Paradox.ai, the bizarre personality quiz required of prospective food and service workers that tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of “agreeableness” and “emotional stability,” and Joseph covered Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies; an applicant faced with a Fairgo AI recruiter said it was a “perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism.” And in February, I wrote about Anthropic, the company that made AI writing assistant Claude, adding a requirement to open role descriptions that made applicants agree that they wouldn’t use an AI assistant to help with their application. Companies don’t want you using AI, but they’ll send an AI avatar to do their job for them.
Apriora did not respond to requests for comment.
