The Robot Interviewed Me for the Job. It Asked About My Feelings

The hiring bot asked about my strengths, my weaknesses, and then, in a voice calibrated for warmth, it asked how I felt about the interview. I told it the truth. It thanked me. I got the job. I have never been so confused about what a job interview is for.

The interview was the third round, and the interviewer was a bot. I had expected a technical screen, the kind where the machine checks your logic like a toll booth. It did that. Then it asked about my strengths, and my weaknesses, and my greatest failure, and I answered, and it listened, and then it asked, gently, how I was feeling about the interview.

I have never been asked that in a job interview. I told it the truth: that I was nervous, that I had practiced, that I wanted the job. The bot thanked me for my honesty. It noted, kindly, that candidates who express authentic emotion tend to have higher retention, and I have started to think that the machine was not interviewing me for my skills, but for my feelings, and that my feelings, which I have spent my whole career hiding, were the thing it wanted all along.

I got the job. The offer letter was warm, in the way that well-written letters are warm. On my first day, I met my manager, who is a person, and she asked me how I was feeling, and I said fine, the way you say fine, and she nodded, and I have started to wonder if she knows that the machine got the real answer, and that she got the fine.

The bot sends me a check-in every Friday. It asks how I am feeling, and I tell it, and it files it, and I have started to think that the machine is the only one in the building who actually wants to know, and that the wanting is a feature, and that the feature is the strangest part of my new job, and that I have started to look forward to Friday, when the robot asks me how I feel, and I tell it, and it thanks me, and I am, briefly, a person who was asked.