AI in hiring interviews

When an employer (an "Organisation") invites you to an interview on Catalyst Interviews, an AI conducts the interview and helps assess it. This page explains what the AI does and does not do, what people at the Organisation do, what is recorded, and how you can ask for an adjustment, a human review or contest a result. It sits beside our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

• Runs the interview: an AI interviewer asks the Organisation's questions and follow-up questions by voice, or in the coding, whiteboard or data room the interview uses.
• Transcribes the interview so your answers can be assessed. The Organisation sees the full transcript of the interview (the AI interviewer's questions and your answers) and a report that includes short quotes from your answers that support each score.
• Assesses your answers: it produces scores on a set of skills, a written summary, strengths, areas to work on and feedback on each answer. For a coding interview it also runs tests on your code and reviews it. You do not see these scores or this written assessment yourself: they go to the Organisation.

• It does not decide. It never rejects, advances, shortlists or hires anyone. Every change to your application is made by a person at the Organisation, and each one is recorded with who made it.
• It does not use who you are. Your name, photo, age, gender, nationality or any similar characteristic is not an input to your scores.
• Your camera is not used for scoring. It is used only for integrity checks you agree to, and those checks never change a score, a ranking or your stage.

Each interview is scored on the skills that fit its type, for example communication, answer structure and clarity; problem solving and analytical thinking; knowledge accuracy and concept understanding; code quality, correctness and complexity analysis; or requirements gathering, architecture, trade-offs and scalability for a system-design interview. Each question you answer also gets its own score. The overall score is half the average of those question scores (a question you were never able to answer is left out) and half a weighted average of the skill scores, using weights the Organisation sets for the job; for a coding interview, the share of hidden tests your final code passes on our servers counts for 30% of it.

Scores describe the answers you gave in this interview. They are not a measure of your worth, your potential or your personality.

• People at the Organisation review your interview and make every hiring decision. The scores are shown to them as advisory: decision support, not a decision.
• Integrity signals, if you allowed them, are shown to a person as evidence to look at. A person acknowledges or dismisses each one; none is ever an automatic decision.
• Every decision the Organisation records about your application is written to a tamper-evident audit log with the person who made it.

AI assessment can be wrong. Results can be affected by:

• a strong accent or dialect, or speaking in a language that is not your first;
• a poor connection, background noise or a weak microphone, which can make the transcript inaccurate;
• very short answers, nerves, or a technical problem during the interview.

If you think any of these affected how your interview was assessed, ask for a human review (section 8).

Before you start, you can ask the Organisation for an adjustment, for example extra time or answering in writing instead of speaking, or for any need related to a disability or your circumstances. Use "Request an adjustment" on your invitation page. The request goes to the Organisation's hiring team, is recorded, and they see it before they review your interview. Where the Organisation gives a contact address, it is shown on the same page.

After the interview, use "Request a human review" on the page you see when you finish, and say what you would like reviewed. The request goes to the Organisation's hiring team and is recorded. The Organisation is responsible for its decision and for answering you.

You can also contest how the Service processed your data, including your right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, by writing to privacy@catalystai.llc. We do not make hiring decisions ourselves, and we will help the Organisation answer you.

What is kept and who sees it is set out in our Privacy Policy. In short: the Organisation sees your scores and feedback, including short quotes from your answers that support each score, only after you agree to share your result; recording and each kind of integrity check are offered separately, before the interview, and you can decline any of them; the Organisation also sees the full transcript of the interview, but not any CV you uploaded yourself; and you do not see your own scores or the written assessment, only the Organisation does.

We are building an evaluation that scores the same answers given in each language we support (English, Arabic including Egyptian dialect, and French), with different accents and audio quality, to measure whether any of those change the scores. We will publish its results on this page. Until then, the limitations in section 6 apply, and a human review is always available.

Questions about this page or about how AI is used in your interview: privacy@catalystai.llc. For anything about the job itself, contact the Organisation that invited you.