A friend of mine works in HR for a large-ish company. The other day he told me, all serious, that his team is starting to worry about Gen Z cheating in AI video interviews.
Apparently there's an internal Slack channel about it. He sent me a TikTok of some 22-year-old running ChatGPT on a second monitor and reading off the answers in a HireVue. It was kinda hilarious. You can’t help but cheer for the person who’s trying anything just to get ahead in an indifferent corporate world.
Meanwhile, at my HQ, we talk to a lot of US job seekers. At least half of them say they have used AI to prep for interviews, which is fine, that's just resume prep at this point. But the part that got me was the breakdown of who's actually using AI live, during the interview, to feed themselves answers in real time. The entry-level candidates are under 2% while the C-suite is nearly at 9%.
So it looks like the senior executives are cheating in AI interviews at almost five times the rate of the entry-level applicants they keep complaining about. The whole "Gen Z is gaming the system" panic? It might actually be the executives. The same people whose offices the rest of us can never quite figure out what they actually do all day.
Personally, I find it darkly funny. The same C-suite that orders return-to-office and whatnot because they don't trust their people to work from home is also the group secretly running ChatGPT in a side window during their own job interviews. The hypocrisy is almost a perfect circle.
I keep thinking about that line from Margin Call. "There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat." Apparently the C-suite picked option 3. Anyway. The next time HR rolls out a new "interview integrity" tool because they're worried about applicants gaming the system, ask them which level of the org chart it's targeting. Pretty sure I know the answer. And so do they.