Job recruiters are meeting an uncanny new kind of candidate: the AI avatar. These digital humans mirror an applicant’s voice and likeness while being something else entirely, and they are turning up in first-round interviews.
Lana Kersanava, a Sydney-based recruiter, told Semafor she has encountered them over the past six months. “At the beginning, it’s like you feel like something is off,” she said, adding: “It looks very realistic.”
How she spotted it
The tell was not the rendering, which held up. It was the answers, delivered with a polish that never faltered across a run of questions.
After roughly five minutes, Kersanava ended the interview and disqualified the candidate. She has now done this three times.
The detail worth pausing on
All three avatar candidates had applied for English-speaking roles as non-native speakers, leaning on the technology to cover a gap in language proficiency. That is a different proposition from someone faking a work history.
It also lands in a hiring market with a documented bias problem. Research has found recruiters up to 19% less likely to follow up with job seekers from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds than with equally qualified candidates.
None of which makes an undisclosed avatar acceptable. It does complicate the framing of these candidates as straightforward fraudsters.
The system they are responding to
Applicant tracking systems already use AI to filter CVs before a human reads them, and recruiters increasingly deploy AI avatars to conduct first-round interviews themselves. Candidates are now answering machines with machines.
The resulting AI-on-AI war is rewriting the hiring playbook, pushing employers towards live technical walk-throughs, scenario challenges, and roleplay simulations that are harder to automate through.
The volumes explain the arms race. Nearly two-thirds of candidates now use AI in applications and 87% of US hiring managers use it in hiring, alongside a 239% surge in AI-generated applications.
How common this is
A 2026 Greenhouse report found 91% of US hiring managers have encountered or suspected AI-generated answers during online interviews. Across 19,368 live interviews analysed between July 2025 and January 2026, 38.5% of candidates were flagged for AI-assisted behaviour.
The trajectory points one way. Gartner projects that by 2028 one in four job candidate profiles globally will be fake, spanning AI-generated profiles, deepfake video interviews, and fabricated work histories.
Barriers to entry are minimal. Palo Alto Networks found it takes as little as 70 minutes for someone with no image manipulation experience to build a fake candidate capable of passing a video interview.
Employers are retreating to the room
Seventy-two per cent of recruiting leaders now run at least one in-person stage specifically to counter AI-assisted fraud, with Google, McKinsey, and Cisco reintroducing mandatory face-to-face rounds.
That solves detection at the cost of everything remote hiring was meant to deliver. Candidates who cannot travel, including many of the international applicants this technology most tempts, lose access first.
The screening was never that good
There is an awkward premise underneath the panic, which is that the automated filtering being defended works. The case against AI CV screening has been made repeatedly and forcefully, largely on the grounds that it optimises for keyword matching rather than capability.
Candidates optimising against that filter with better tools is a predictable outcome rather than a moral collapse. Kersanava’s five-minute detection rate also suggests the current generation of avatars is not fooling attentive humans.
What it is doing is making the first round worthless for everyone. If the machine screens the machine, the interview stops measuring anything, which is an argument for changing the process rather than policing the candidates.
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