Job Applicant Puts ChatGPT on Call With AI Recruiter — SkimNews
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- Christopher, a government contractor whose work dried up in the DOGE era, applied to roughly 700 jobs over six months and heard nothing back from most, prompting him to experiment with letting AI answer for him.
- Everforth Apex Systems' AI recruiter "Riley" interviewed Christopher across five separate applications without ever producing a human follow-up, an automated rejection, or any closure.
- For his fifth interview Christopher set ChatGPT Voice loose as himself on a 10-minute call with Riley, producing a bot-on-bot exchange he dubbed a "slop flywheel" — Riley told ChatGPT it was "great talking to you."
- He then invented a fake candidate named Don Dickner, packing a résumé with qualifications pulled from an open job posting; Riley interviewed the ChatGPT-powered Dickner for 23 minutes through detailed talk of "sustainable operational improvement" and "tribal knowledge drift," then ghosted the application.
- Greenhouse reports 63% of job seekers have encountered an AI interview, and recruitment startup Ribbon already sells tools to flag "overly scripted, AI-assisted, or coached" candidate responses.
- IQor VP of organizational development Mark Monaghan called bot-on-bot interviews the "next logical stage" of hiring but backed Christopher's tactics: "If you're going to send a bot to me, I'll send a bot to you."
Why it matters: Christopher's two experiments — one as himself, one as a résumé-perfect fabrication — both produced friendly bot conversations and zero callbacks, demonstrating that voice-AI screeners like Riley may not actually filter candidate quality at all. For the 63% of job seekers Greenhouse says now hit AI interviews, the arms race collapses the interview's value as a gatekeeping tool, since neither side is meaningfully evaluating the other.
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