• EY has an AI-powered avatar named eVe that candidates can use for a pre-interview.
• The AI avatar allows candidates to ask questions and can help them prep for a real-person interview.
• EY also lets some candidates take virtual tours of their offices in the metaverse.

EY, a Big Four accounting and consulting firm, is turning to technology to improve its recruiting process — in part by allowing job candidates to warm up with an AI interviewer before getting face-to-face with a real person.

Company leaders who work on recruiting and metaverse experiences told Business Insider the AI interviewer was aimed at providing a better — and potentially less stressful — hiring process.

A link to the AI-powered avatar, called eVe, is sent out to candidates as soon as they are selected to advance to the interview stage. eVe can answer questions about the company and help candidates prepare for their interview with a real person, according to Francesca Jones, an early careers leader at EY.

The AI avatar, which appears on the screen as a real person would during a video chat, can be spoken to directly and offers verbal answers back within moments, mimicking an actual conversation. It can also be used with text like other chatbots.

eVe can walk candidates through what the EY hiring process is like and help with case study preparation. It can also answer follow-up questions and give detailed responses about how benefits like healthcare and retirement plans work at the company. eVe can be used at any point in the process, so candidates can revisit it when weighing whether or not to accept a job offer.

EY started offering eVe to job candidates in early October, so they are still waiting to get a fuller picture of how it is being used. However, eVe went through months of internal user testing with hundreds of interns, which gave a glimpse into how early-career professionals in particular would use the tool.

"I was amazed by the types of questions they asked and how much time they actually spent with it," Domhnaill Hernon, global lead of EY's Metaverse Lab, told Business Insider. He suspected the younger generation might spend two to three minutes with eVe and then move on, but they were regularly spending 15 to 20 minutes engaging with it conversationally, asking questions and follow-ups.

One intern who spent 25 minutes talking to eVe went into extreme detail evaluating EY's compensation benefits, particularly comparing the company's pension plan to its 401K offering. Others asked the sort of questions that many early-career professionals want to know ahead of interviews but might be afraid to ask, like what to wear.

Though it is powered by an OpenAI GPT-4 large language model, eVe's knowledge base comes entirely from EY content, so the AI avatar is basing all of its responses on information that is specific to the company, rather than generic answers pulled from the internet.

Jones said that beyond enhancing the recruiting process, the avatar also signals to candidates that the company is ahead of the game from a technology standpoint.

EY, like other major consulting firms, has focused heavily on AI. The company announced last year it had invested $1.4 billion on the technology and created its own large language model.

It's also not the only company to incorporate AI into the hiring process, with so-called AI interviewers becoming more common in the generative AI boom. Companies and recruiters are also using AI to sort through resumes and cover letters.

Apriora, a startup founded last year, provides companies with an AI interviewer called Alex, who can conduct early-stage interviews. The AI interviewer asks questions chosen by the company and can ask the candidate follow-up questions in real time. The startup raised $2.8 million in seed funding and graduated from startup-incubator Y Combinator.

Hernon said they worked with behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, and learning leaders inside and outside of EY to understand psychological safety, with the aim of reducing the "social threat" felt by the user as much as possible. In other words, they wanted eVe to feel less intimidating than a real person might, encouraging the user to ask questions that they otherwise might be too embarrassed to ask.

With that in mind, the team chose to make eVe look human-like, but not like it was pretending to be human, so the avatar is not photorealistic.

"You've removed that human social threat, but yet at the same time it feels human enough that they want to spend time interacting with it," he said.

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