Has AI Broken Virtual Interviewing?

Why the future of hiring may require more human verification, not less

Over the last decade, virtual interviewing transformed talent acquisition. What began as a convenience became a necessity during the pandemic and ultimately evolved into the default hiring model for many organizations. Virtual interviewing expanded access to talent, accelerated hiring timelines, reduced costs, and improved candidate experience. It allowed organizations to recruit globally while enabling candidates to interview from anywhere.

For many employers, there appeared to be little reason to return to traditional face-to-face hiring practices. Yet as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in the hiring process, a new question is emerging in boardrooms, HR leadership teams, and talent acquisition functions around the world: has AI broken virtual interviewing?

The question may sound provocative, but it reflects a growing reality. As technology has made interviewing more efficient, it has simultaneously made candidate authenticity more difficult to verify. The challenge facing employers is no longer simply identifying talent. It is determining whether the person participating in the interview is truly the person they intend to hire.

The future of hiring may not be about choosing between virtual and in-person interviews. Instead, it may be about rebuilding trust in the hiring process through new forms of human verification.

Virtual Interviewing Solved Real Problems

The rise of virtual interviewing delivered undeniable benefits for both organizations and candidates. Talent acquisition teams gained access to wider talent pools unrestricted by geography. Candidates no longer needed to travel long distances for interviews. Scheduling became faster and more flexible. Hiring managers could participate from multiple locations, and organizations reduced the significant costs associated with face-to-face hiring processes.

Virtual interviewing also aligned with broader workplace trends. As remote and hybrid work became more common, recruiting processes naturally evolved to match. Employers increasingly viewed location as less important than capability, and technology made it possible to assess candidates regardless of where they were based.

Talent acquisition functions embraced this development because it directly supported the metrics by which these teams are measured. Virtual interviewing helped recruiters move candidates through the process faster, reduced scheduling friction with hiring managers, and made it easier to manage high-volume or multi-location hiring campaigns. This translated into stronger performance against time-to-hire and time-to-fill targets, which often sit at the heart of service-level agreements, and commercial scorecards in the case of Recruitment Process Outsourcing companies.

In many respects, virtual interviewing represented a clear advancement in hiring. Few organizations would willingly return to a model where every interview required travel, significant coordination, and lengthy hiring cycles. However, virtual interviewing was designed for a world where most participants could be assumed to be acting independently. AI is changing that assumption.

AI Has Created New Vulnerabilities

The same technology that is enhancing productivity across recruitment is also creating entirely new risks. Candidates can use these tools for legitimate purposes, such as refining CVs or preparing for interviews. However, the same capabilities can also be used to misrepresent a candidate’s skills, experience, or identity. Real-time coaching tools can provide responses during interviews. Voice enhancement technology can alter speech patterns. Emerging deepfake capabilities make it possible to manipulate video feeds, while proxy interviewing schemes allow another individual to participate in the selection process on behalf of a candidate.

Most concerning is the speed at which these technologies are improving. Historically, interviewers focused on assessing a candidate’s skills, experience, and behaviors. Increasingly, they must also consider authenticity. Online interview fraud has become sufficiently widespread that some interviewers now ask candidates to touch their face to help reveal the use of visual filters, or to keep their hands visible while questions are being asked to reduce the likelihood of searching for answers in real time. While doing so can occasionally disrupt lower-tier deepfake video overlays, it is an incomplete defense and an unwelcome intrusion into the candidate experience.

The challenge is not that every candidate is behaving dishonestly. The challenge is that employers can no longer assume authenticity as a given.

The Emergence of High-Trust Hiring

Faced with these new risks, some organizations may be tempted to advocate for a complete return to in-person interviewing. That would be a mistake. Virtual interviewing remains too valuable, too efficient, and too aligned with modern workforce expectations to abandon entirely. Instead, a more balanced model is beginning to emerge.

Perhaps the most telling indicator of the industry’s growing concern is that some employers are beginning to reintroduce mandatory in-person stages into what had become fully virtual hiring processes. For years, the assumption was that technology would continue to remove human touchpoints from recruitment. The emerging reality may be the opposite.

Public examples are beginning to illustrate this shift. Google has been reported as introducing at least one in-person interview round for some candidates, with Chief Executive Sundar Pichai framing it as a way to confirm that candidates have mastered the fundamentals. Cisco has also been cited as adapting its hiring process with additional verification steps and enhanced background checks that may include an in-person component, while McKinsey has reportedly asked hiring managers to schedule at least one face-to-face meeting before extending some offers. Deloitte UK reinstated in-person final-stage interviews for its graduate and apprenticeship programs after regulatory concerns about the risks of fully online recruitment assessments. Taken together, these examples suggest that the return of face-to-face interaction is not simply nostalgia for pre-pandemic hiring; it is becoming a targeted control in roles and sectors where capability, identity, judgement, and trust carry heightened business consequences.

As AI makes it increasingly easy to simulate competence, enhance responses, and even obscure identity online, organizations are discovering that carefully designed human verification points have become more valuable, not less.

What This Means for TA Leaders and RPO Providers

This shift has significant implications for the future of talent acquisition. Historically, the success of TA teams has been measured through three primary dimensions: speed, cost, and quality. Those measures remain important. However, AI-enabled candidate fraud introduces a fourth dimension that may become equally critical: trust.

As talent acquisition evolves, organizations may increasingly expect their TA teams to help protect hiring integrity, not simply facilitate hiring activity. The next generation of talent acquisition strategies may need to answer questions that go beyond process execution. How do we verify candidate authenticity? How do we identify high-risk hiring scenarios? What controls should be implemented during virtual assessments? How do we balance candidate experience against fraud prevention? What safeguards are necessary in an AI-enabled hiring environment?

These are not simply recruitment questions. They are business risk questions. Organizations routinely invest in cybersecurity to protect digital assets. As candidate fraud becomes more sophisticated, talent acquisition leaders will need similar strategies to protect workforce quality.

A return to fully in-person interviewing, or even the adoption of a standard hybrid model, may not be sufficient on its own. Instead, TA leaders may need to build a risk-based approach into the hiring process, with the level of human verification increasing in line with the risk exposure, seniority, or sensitivity of the role. Where the risk is significant, human verification may also need to be reinforced by technology that can help surface potential indicators of candidate fraud during interviews and assessments. These tools can support identity and liveness verification, flag unusual activity such as tab switching or the use of external applications, identify possible deepfake or voice manipulation, and highlight responses that appear overly scripted or generated in real time.

For RPO providers, these capabilities should increasingly be integrated into the technology platforms and workflows through which recruitment services are delivered. Rather than adding isolated controls at individual stages, providers can embed verification, monitoring, escalation, and human review across the hiring journey, giving clients a more consistent and auditable approach to managing candidate risk. One example is AMS One by AMS, a Korn Ferry company, whose Interview Agent can conduct adaptive, role-relevant interviews and provide video recordings, transcripts, response scoring, and indicators of potential cheating.

This integrated approach becomes particularly important when hiring fully remote employees, who may never meet their employer in person, as well as for organizations that operate without permanent physical offices. In these environments, trust and identity verification must be built into the virtual hiring process itself.

Technology, however, should not become a substitute for human judgement, which must remain central to verifying authenticity. As interview fraud evolves, so too must the skills, awareness, and confidence of those responsible for recognizing it.

Trust Will Become the Differentiator

The recruitment industry has spent years optimizing for speed and efficiency. AI will undoubtedly accelerate these trends further. Yet there is a growing irony at the heart of modern hiring. The more technology removes friction from the process, the greater the challenge of confirming authenticity.

This does not mean organizations should reject AI. Nor does it mean the industry should return to outdated hiring practices. It does, however, mean that talent leaders must rethink how trust is established in a world where technology can convincingly replicate human interaction.

The future of hiring will not belong to organizations that simply interview faster. It will belong to organizations that can confidently answer a far more fundamental question: how do we know that the person we hire is the person we interviewed?

In an era of AI-enabled recruiting, that may become the most important talent acquisition question of all.