‘I used AI to land a job offer – from HMRC’s counter fraud department’

Robyn’s faith in AI paid off – she received an invitation to interview by email shortly afterwards. While she was grateful to have made it this far with the help of OpenAI’s software, she assumed she’d be on her own from then on. It surely couldn’t be possible to cheat a job interview using ChatGPT, she reasoned.

But when HMRC told Robyn that the interview would be held over a Zoom call – and that she would have between two and five minutes to answer most of the questions – it became clear that she would be able to take her tactic all the way to the end of the process.

During the interview, Robyn had two web browser windows open on her laptop simultaneously – one with the video call with HMRC’s recruiters, and the other with ChatGPT. She primed the bot by telling it that she was having the interview for the role of Counter Fraud Investigation Officer with HMRC, and that she would be given scenarios to determine her ability to “make effective decisions”.

The first scenario saw Robyn attend a theoretical house search where a suspect may have been smuggling illicit goods into the country. She suspects this question was worth the most marks in the eyes of the interviewers, as she had five minutes to prepare an answer to it – more than any other. 

The recruiters asked her how she should respond if approached by a neighbour telling her they suspected that the person was “storing dodgy goods in a nearby garage”. 

ChatGPT provided a detailed list of six key steps to take, which she relayed to the interviewers in her own words.

For another question, when Robyn was asked how she’d deal with colleagues holding contrasting viewpoints to her own, ChatGPT gave her a lengthy answer that felt too impersonal. To fix this, she simply gave the bot a further instruction to give her a more concise, colloquial answer.

For the duration of the interview, Robyn let ChatGPT do the thinking while she did the talking. She estimates that there were eight questions in total, of which she answered roughly half with the help of the chatbot.

“I tried not to repeat the answers back word for word, but I used the ideas the AI was giving me,” she said.

For the interviewers, ChatGPT’s judgement seemed adequate – Robyn received a job offer several weeks later. 

“I’m not sure if I would’ve passed the interview without it,” she said.