If as a hiring organization, you aren't willing to spend the effort, time, and money to provide a good recruiting process, that's a huge red flag for the kind of candidates you want and the kind of employee experience you provide. If you're willing to cut costs in finding candidates, that could signal you're willing to cut costs for retaining candidates too.
I agree and I would never use AI to properly interview someone.
This is a screening interview. It's at the top of the recruitment funnel. The alternative is seeing fewer candidates (because you can't have engineers do non-stop interviews) or just filtering heavily based on CVs. Neither option is good.
If you as a hiring manager are so busy you can't invest in a thoughtful recruitment process, what's that going to mean when I come onboard? Will I be left to fend for myself in those first few months, feeling overwhelmed by all the new information and team dynamics? Or is it somehow going to be different once I'm employed by you?
The way I see it, if you are a hiring manager you are just going to talk to a HR person to screen this people for you actually. The majority of CV's that get to the Hiring Manager get filtered by non-technical HR people. Instead you have a tool that sumarizes the way you interact and think on a 20 min problem solving thingy. Imho I prefer to get a hold of this then having a HR person call me for 15 minutes and talk about my experience and stuff...
This is a screen, though; they are still going to interview you if you pass. The alternative is to screen candidates otherwise in a way that may lead you to be culled (e.g., by your resume) without a chance to get your foot in the door.
They are still going to interview if you choose to move forwards with this one sided time sink [1], and you pass. The first half of that criteria will filter out many of the good candidates.
Which as yanyu says is a signal the company isn't "willing to spend the effort, time, and money to provide a good recruiting process, [which is] a huge red flag for the kind of candidates you want and the kind of employee experience you provide".
Which circles around and creates even more incentive for good candidates not to participate.
There's no doubt a market on both sides for hiring mediocre candidates. Approximately everyone has a job after all, not just the best people, but a tool like this is clearly optimizing for that not for excellence.
[1] See the excellent description of why this is problematic as a candidate who values your own time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801853
That's what makes people feel valued and human, needing to get past a robot before they're allowed to talk to people.
And to be clear, I think hiring today is completely broken already. This kind of thing is just one more step in the direction of marginalizing people who are already struggling to find work. In an already broken hiring system, these approaches to "save engineering time" or "drive a more efficient hiring process" exacerbate the divide between those who have jobs and those who are desperate to get a fair shot, and that’s what feels truly dehumanizing.
Logically, you should prefer a hiring system that casts a wider net using automation if you are struggling to find work, assuming the problem is getting an interview.