WRITINGS
The Curious Case of the Commute: Why Your Interview is Back in 3D
By Gagan Malik
In 2024, nearly half of all job seekers used generative AI to game their way through applications and interviews. Half. Employers are not bringing back in-person interviews because they missed you, your firm handshake, or the small talk about your commute. They are bringing them back because your AI is getting the job, and then you have to show up and actually do it. In-person interview requests jumped from 5% to 30% in a single year. That is not a trend. That is a correction. worklife
The Arms Race Nobody Won
The received wisdom was that virtual interviews were efficient, equitable, and the future of hiring. Wrong on all three counts. What companies discovered is that they had built a system so gameable it was effectively handing offers to algorithms. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai went on the Lex Fridman podcast and said his company is reinstating in-person rounds "just to make sure the fundamentals are there". That is the world's most sophisticated tech operation saying, in plain English: we have a fraud problem, and we cannot solve it over Zoom. Brilliant self-diagnosis. Expensive lesson. hindustantimes
The Numbers Do Not Lie, But Candidates Do
Six Percent Is a Lot
A Gartner survey of 3,000 job seekers found that 6% had participated in active interview fraud, meaning someone or something else took the interview for them. Gartner also predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles globally will be fake. Think of the virtual interview as a nightclub bouncer who cannot see the queue. The door is open. The bots are getting in. hindustantimes
The Silent Drop-Off
Cisco added in-person rounds after repeatedly encountering final-stage candidates with "something that feels off," in the words of chief people officer Kelly Jones. What proved most diagnostic: the moment the in-person requirement gets mentioned, some candidates simply vanish. Cisco reports this happens regularly. Ghost is the new rejection letter. hindustantimes
The McKinsey Tell
McKinsey began mandating at least one in-person touchpoint roughly 18 months ago, originally to better assess rapport-building skills for client-facing roles. The rise of AI cheating deepened that commitment. When McKinsey changes a process it is not for sentimental reasons. It is because the old process stopped producing reliable outputs. Follow the logic, not the nostalgia. hindustantimes
I Was Part of the Problem
I will own this. Around 2022 I hired a senior creative lead on the strength of three immaculate video interviews. Articulate, sharp, camera-confident. He showed up to his first live client presentation and the client rang me privately afterwards to ask if something was wrong. Same person. Different altitude entirely. I spent the next six months and roughly £40,000 in recruitment fees, notice-period costs, and client-relationship repair learning that I had been screening for the ability to perform on camera, not the ability to do the job. I thought I was running a modern, efficient hiring process. I was running an audition for a presenter role that did not exist.
The broader absurdity is this: the companies now insisting you commute in for a final-stage interview are largely the same ones who spent 2020 to 2023 outsourcing their entire hiring stack to keyword-matching algorithms that rejected candidates based on CV formatting. They created the fraud vacuum by removing human judgment from the process. Now they want you on a train at 8am to restore it. The audacity is, at minimum, consistent. worklife
Kill, Keep, Create
The future is not a wholesale return to three-panel interview rooms with weak coffee and motivational posters. Gartner data shows 68% of interviews remain virtual and that is not reversing. But the direction of travel is settled. worklife
- Kill: The assumption that a fully virtual hiring process is inherently rigorous. It was always a cost-saving measure dressed in the language of innovation.
- Keep: Virtual rounds for early screening. Fast, inclusive, no room booking required.
- Create: A structured hybrid model where in-person is mandatory at the final stage, with candidate travel reimbursed. Cisco and McKinsey are already here. The FTSE 100 follows by 2027, quietly, without a press release. hindustantimes
Polish the Shoes
Stop treating an in-person interview as a logistical inconvenience and start treating it as the only round that counts. Practice making eye contact without a screen as your emotional buffer. Charge the Oyster card. Rehearse the handshake. And if the prospect of sixty minutes in a room with a hiring manager, with no AI whispering answers in your earpiece, genuinely unsettles you, that reaction is the most honest performance review you will ever receive.
The commute was always the warm-up. Now it is the test. Welcome back to the room.
