Building trust in automatic video interviews using various AI interfaces: Tangibility, immediacy, and transparency

As the demand for automatic video interviews powered by artificial intelligence (AI) increases among employers in the postpandemic era, so do concerns over job applicants' trust in the technology. There are various forms of AI-based video interviews with and without the features of tangibility, immediacy, and transparency used for preemployment screening, and these features may distinctively influence applicants' trust in the technology and whether they engage in or disengage from the hiring process accordingly. This field study involved designing a test of the effect of various forms of AI-based video interviews on interviewees' cognitive and affective trust based on the self-reporting of 152 real job applicants. The study found that AI used in asynchronous video interviews (AI-AVI) increased applicants' cognitive trust from that in the non-AI condition. Moreover, when the AI-AVI had features of tangibility and transparency, the applicants’ cognitive and affective trust increased. However, the feature of immediacy did not have a statistically significant impact. Contrary to concern over the potential negative effects caused by AI and its features, no statistically significant impacts were found in this study.