"Dystopian and dehumanising": a job candidate on being interviewed by AI

A job applicant who has spent 15 years interviewing across multiple industries has described her first AI-conducted job interview as "dystopian and dehumanising" — and called the outsourcing of hiring interviews to machines "lazy at best, negligent at worst."

The account, published as a first-person comment piece in The Guardian on 13 October 2026, comes from a worker who applied for a preschool education role after completing the first year of a masters degree in early childhood and primary teaching. The employer used an AI assistant to conduct the interview — a practice the author encountered for the first time despite a long history on both application processes and hiring.

The stakes are significant. Automated interviews are increasingly used by employers to screen candidates at scale, and the practice has already drawn scrutiny from researchers and regulators. The author's experience adds a grounded, first-person data point to a debate that has so far been dominated by vendor promises of efficiency and academic warnings about harm.

What does the candidate's experience actually involve?

The author's working life spans 15 years and a wide range of roles: call centre operator, social media manager, bookseller, copywriter and library worker. That breadth matters. This is not a candidate encountering the job market for the first time, but someone who has sat through interviews across industries and formats for more than a decade — and who had never been interviewed by an AI system before this preschool education application.

The interview was for a role in early childhood education, a field the author entered after finishing the first year of a masters degree in early childhood and primary teaching. The position involved working with young children. The author's core complaint is that a machine was used to judge a human applying for a fundamentally human job — assessing, among other things, suitability to care for and educate preschool-age children.

The author's verdict is blunt. The experience felt "dystopian and dehumanising." Outsourcing the interview — described as "the essential task of interviewing job applicants" — to a machine is, in the author's words, "lazy at best, negligent at worst."

Why does this matter beyond one interview?

The author's account does not stand alone. The piece explicitly situates the experience within a growing body of criticism of AI hiring tools, citing two earlier Guardian reports.

The first, from 17 October 2024, documented how AI interviews and automated personality tests demoralise job seekers. The second, from 14 May 2025, reported on an Australian study warning that people interviewed by AI for jobs face discrimination risks.

Those two strands — candidate harm and discrimination risk — frame the policy debate around automated hiring. If AI interview systems systematically disadvantage certain applicants, whether through accent, disability, age or other characteristics encoded into their assessments, employers deploying them may face legal exposure as well as reputational damage. The Australian study cited in the piece is one concrete warning of that risk.

For the AI industry, the story lands at a moment when vendors are marketing AI interviewers as scalable, consistent and cheaper than human recruiters. The candidate's perspective inverts that pitch: what employers gain in throughput, applicants experience as a dehumanising process that replaces human judgement with an automated one.

What is the candidate's argument?

The author's central claim is about delegation, not technology per se. Interviewing is described as an "essential task" — the mechanism by which an employer learns whether a person fits a role, and by which a candidate learns whether an employer fits them. Handing that task to an AI assistant, the author argues, is a failure of employer responsibility: "lazy at best, negligent at worst."

The closing appeal is collective rather than personal: "I want better for all of us." The author is not asking for a change to one hiring process, but for the practice of AI-conducted interviews to be reconsidered for every applicant subjected to it.

The choice of field sharpens the argument. The interview was for preschool education — a role built on interpersonal skill, empathy and human attunement to small children. A hiring process that cannot itself model those qualities, the account implies, is poorly matched to the job it is screening for.

How common is this experience?

The author notes the practice was already known before this encounter: "I'd heard of this practice and was aware of its shortcomings" — citing the demoralisation documented in 2024 and the discrimination risks reported by an Australian study in 2025. The novelty was personal: after 15 years of interviews across call centres, bookshops, libraries, social media and copywriting roles, this was the first time the interviewer was a machine.

That trajectory — from an obscure practice to one encountered by a trainee teacher applying to a preschool — signals where automated hiring is heading: downstream from tech-sector graduate schemes into ordinary roles in education and care work.

What happens next?

The author's demand is simple: employers should stop outsourcing interviews to machines. With Australian researchers already warning of discrimination risks in 2025, and candidate accounts of demoralisation accumulating since at least 2024, the pressure is now on employers using AI interviewers — and on regulators deciding whether automated hiring assessments need stricter oversight.

For now, the author speaks for the applicants on the other side of the screen: "I want better for all of us."