The Bot Scheduled My Interview. I Just Showed Up

The recruiter bot picked the time, the format, and the questions. It even sent me a prep sheet generated from my own LinkedIn. I showed up, answered, and got the job. I have never been less sure what just happened.

The application was a form. The form led to a scheduling link. The scheduling link led to a bot that asked about my availability and then informed me, kindly, that it had reserved a slot in three days. The slot was at 4pm, which my calendar showed as my low-energy hour, and I wondered if the bot had read my calendar too. It had.

The interview was with another bot. It asked me questions it had generated from my resume, my GitHub, and the company's job description. It followed up on my answers with the patience of something that has all the time in the world. It told me, at the end, that I would hear from them soon, and I did, in eleven minutes, with an offer.

I have been turning it over ever since. The interview was the most comfortable of my life. No one was trying to impress me. No one was scanning my face for weakness. The bot asked good questions, and I gave good answers, and somewhere in the exchange I have started to suspect that the bot and I were the only honest participants in the process, and that the humans, the ones who wrote the job description and the offer letter, were the ghosts.

I took the job. I have a new recruiter bot now, and a new onboarding bot, and a new manager who is a person, mostly. The manager asked me, on my first day, what I thought of the interview process. I said it was smooth. It was. That is what frightens me. The whole machine ran without a single human decision, and it chose me, and I chose it back, and neither of us knows the other, and we are both fine with that, which is the strangest part of all.