The job interview is the latest workplace ritual where AI is being invited into the chair — and the people who run hiring are far more comfortable with that than the people being hired.
A new survey by HR software company BambooHR, released on 1 September and covered this week by HRM Online NZ, found that 67 per cent of HR professionals would trust AI to conduct a candidate interview on its own. Among ordinary employees, that figure was 34 per cent.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
HR teams are moving AI beyond résumé screening and into the interview room itself, and most of them are fine with it. Workers are not — and even the HR professionals surveyed admit their AI hiring tools have a bias problem. For job seekers, the practical takeaway is that AI is becoming part of the process on both sides of the table, and preparing for that is now a career skill in its own right.
What the Survey Found
BambooHR’s report, “Redesigning Work: AI’s Performance Review”, drew on an online survey of 1,608 full-time US desk workers, including a subgroup of 520 HR professionals at manager level or above. Data was collected between 26 June and 15 July 2026, so it reflects sentiment from the middle of this year rather than a single moment.
The headline numbers:
- 67 per cent of HR professionals would trust AI to conduct a candidate interview on its own — versus 34 per cent of employees.
- 92 per cent of HR professionals are already piloting or planning AI agents across the HR lifecycle: screening candidates, monitoring flight risk, enforcing policies.
- 80 per cent of HR professionals admit to finding bias problems in the AI tools they use for hiring — including 33 per cent who say they have observed a pattern of demographic bias specifically.
- More broadly, workers spend the equivalent of 47 work days a year using AI, but roughly 20 of those days are lost to troubleshooting errors and prompt iteration rather than productive output.
That last cluster of findings is the interesting tension. The same population of HR leaders who trust AI to interview a candidate alone also reports, in large majorities, that the tools carry bias they can see. Trust and scepticism are coexisting at the top of the hiring funnel.
The Positive Spin from HR — and Why It Matters
Nicole Csizar, senior director of HR services at BambooHR, framed AI as an enhancement rather than a replacement: “The more we use AI in recruiting, the more human the interview can become. AI can take a lot off an interviewer’s plate: preparing questions, taking notes, organising information — all the things that distract you from really being present with the person you’re talking to.”
There is a genuine upside in that argument. Interviewers juggling note-taking, question lists and candidate rapport often do all three badly. If AI handles the clerical layer, the human can focus on judgement — the part of hiring that is genuinely hard to automate. Done well, that means candidates get a more attentive interviewer, not a machine in a blazer.
There’s also a career angle for HR professionals themselves: as AI agents spread across screening, scheduling and compliance, the people who can supervise, audit and correct those systems are becoming the valuable ones in the profession. A 92 per cent agent-adoption pipeline is not a threat to HR jobs — it is a wholesale redesign of what HR jobs involve.
The Caveat Workers Deserve to Hear
The bias findings cut against the enthusiasm. If 80 per cent of HR professionals have found bias in the AI tools they already use, extending those tools to the interview itself — the highest-stakes, most judgement-laden step in hiring — deserves scrutiny, not just efficiency gains.
BambooHR’s own survey doesn’t claim AI interviews are fair. It documents a trust gap: the people implementing the technology are far more confident in it than the people it will assess. Whether that gap closes will depend less on survey sentiment than on whether companies publish bias audits and keep humans in the loop for final decisions.
For candidates, meanwhile, the skills signal is shifting. Recruiters and hiring commentators increasingly argue that interviews should assess how people collaborate with AI — which tools they choose, how they verify output, and what they do when the machine is confidently wrong. Preparing examples that show judgment over output, not just output itself, is becoming the differentiator.
What It Means for New Zealand
The BambooHR data is US-based, so it describes a market that may move faster — or differently — than New Zealand’s. But the direction of travel is visible here. HRM Online NZ, a publication written for New Zealand HR practitioners, gave the findings prominent coverage this week, which suggests local HR leaders see the shift as relevant to their own hiring pipelines.
New Zealand’s talent pool is small and its hiring cycles are short by international standards. If AI-assisted interviewing spreads here, the practical effects could land quickly: faster screening for employers, but also a premium on candidates who can demonstrate AI fluency and human judgement in the same conversation. And the bias question is arguably more acute in a small market — a tool that systematically screens out one group has fewer places for that group to go.
The constructive read: the same survey shows workers overwhelmingly still value time savings and are confident using AI, even while spending weeks a year fixing its mistakes. The trust gap in hiring is a design problem, not a verdict. Companies that get the balance right — AI for preparation and notes, humans for judgment and accountability — may find they hire better than either pure humans or pure machines.
FAQ
Is AI already conducting job interviews? Not widely as a full replacement, but the BambooHR survey suggests a majority of HR professionals are open to it, and many are piloting AI agents across screening, scheduling and assessment. Most current use is assistance — note-taking, question prep, evaluation support — rather than unsupervised interviews.
Do candidates trust AI interviewers? Far less than HR does in the BambooHR data: 34 per cent of employees versus 67 per cent of HR professionals. The gap suggests companies rolling out AI interviews will need to be transparent about where AI is used and how decisions are made.
Can AI hiring tools be biased? The survey’s own respondents say yes: 80 per cent of HR professionals reported finding bias in the AI tools they use for hiring, and a third observed demographic bias specifically. Bias audits and human review remain important safeguards.
How should job seekers prepare for AI-influenced hiring? Practise talking about outcomes and judgment — what changed because of your work — rather than task lists. Expect AI to appear on both sides: in screening before the interview, and possibly as a note-taker or evaluator during it. Showing how you verify and correct AI output is a growing differentiator.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
