The class of 2025 is using AI in job interviews, and a startup industry is cashing in

The class of 2025 graduated into the worst entry-level job market in five years. Now a growing number of them are using AI tools during live job interviews, and a cottage industry of startups is rushing to sell them the means to do it. Whether that constitutes cheating or common sense depends on which side of the hiring table you sit on, but the numbers behind the trend are not in dispute.

Unemployment among recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 climbed to 5.7 per cent by the end of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, well above the 4.2 per cent national rate. Underemployment, which measures graduates working in jobs that do not require a degree, hit 42.5 per cent, its highest level since 2020. The tech sector, once the default destination for ambitious graduates, shed roughly 245,000 jobs in 2025, according to tracking data from Layoffs.fyi and TrueUp. Another 59,000 have gone in the first three months of 2026.

The graduates who entered this market did so having watched an older cohort get hired, promoted, and then laid off at companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google in the space of 18 months. The lesson they drew was not subtle: competence and loyalty are insufficient protection. And so they arrived armed with a technology that their universities had spent four years telling them to learn.

The tools and the companies selling them

The phenomenon surfaced this week in a press release from LockedIn AI, a startup that sells a product called DUO: a service that combines real-time AI transcription of interview questions with a live human coach who can see the candidate’s screen and provide strategic guidance during the conversation. The press release, distributed via GlobeNewswire, was framed as a trend piece about generational resilience. It was, more precisely, a product advertisement.

LockedIn AI is not alone. Its founder, Kagehiro Mitsuyami, also co-founded Final Round AI, a similar product. Both companies have faced questions about the authenticity of their marketing: reviews on Trustpilot appear to be AI-generated, and independent reviewers have noted that the software can be visible to interviewers when candidates switch between windows. A Gartner survey of 3,000 job seekers found that six per cent admitted to interview fraud, including having someone else impersonate them. Fifty-nine per cent of hiring managers suspect candidates of using AI to misrepresent themselves.

The market for these tools is growing precisely because the conditions that created them are getting worse, not better. The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 45 per cent of employers characterised the job market for the class of 2026 as “fair,” down from “good” the previous year. Hiring projections for new graduates are essentially flat, at 1.6 per cent growth. For candidates submitting dozens of applications and receiving interview invitations at rates below two per cent, the temptation to use every available advantage is considerable.

The hypocrisy argument

The most effective argument in favour of AI-assisted interviewing is not about fairness in the abstract. It is about a specific inconsistency in how technology companies treat AI.

Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, disclosed during an April 2025 earnings call that more than 30 per cent of the company’s new code is now generated with AI assistance, up from 25 per cent six months earlier. Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all encourage their engineers to use AI coding tools daily. Applicant tracking systems powered by AI screen and reject resumes before a human ever reads them. The hiring pipeline is automated from end to end, except on the candidate’s side.

For graduates who spent their university years being told that AI fluency would define their careers, being asked to pretend the technology does not exist during a 45-minute interview feels less like a test of competence and more like a test of compliance. The companies asking them to do so are, in many cases, the same ones that will expect them to use AI tools from their first day on the job.

This argument has real force, but it also has limits. There is a difference between using AI to write code more efficiently and using AI to answer questions about your own experience, judgment, and problem-solving ability. An interview is, at least in theory, a conversation designed to evaluate what a candidate knows and how they think. Outsourcing those answers to a language model, or to a human coach whispering through an earpiece, undermines the purpose of the exercise regardless of how unfair the exercise may be.

The employer response

Companies are already adapting. In-person interview rounds rose from 24 per cent in 2022 to 38 per cent in 2025, according to hiring industry data. Seventy-two per cent of recruiting leaders now conduct at least one in-person stage specifically to combat AI-assisted fraud. Some firms have moved to whiteboard exercises, pair programming sessions, and unstructured conversations that are harder to augment with real-time tools.

The deeper question is whether the interview itself is the right mechanism for evaluating candidates in an AI-saturated labour market. If the goal is to assess what a candidate can produce with the tools they will actually use on the job, then banning those tools during the evaluation makes little sense. If the goal is to assess raw cognitive ability and domain knowledge, then AI assistance defeats the purpose entirely. Most interviews attempt to do both, which is why the current system satisfies no one.

What is clear is that the class of 2025 did not create this problem. They inherited a job market reshaped by pandemic-era overhiring, aggressive cost-cutting, and an AI revolution that is simultaneously creating and destroying opportunity at a pace that neither employers nor candidates have fully absorbed. Their decision to use AI in interviews is not rebellion. It is the predictable behaviour of rational actors in a system that has told them, repeatedly and in every other context, that AI is not optional. The fact that the system now objects to them taking that message seriously is, at minimum, worth examining.