The class of 2025 graduated into the worst starting 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 so. Whether that constitutes cheating or common sense depends on which side of the hiring table you sit on, but the numbers behind this trend are not up for debate.
Unemployment among recent college graduates ages 22 to 27 rose to 5.7 percent by the end of 2025. according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New Yorkwell above the national rate of 4.2 percent. Underemployment, which measures graduates working in jobs that don’t require a degree, hit 42.5 percent, its highest level since 2020. The tech sector, once the default destination for ambitious graduates, lost about 245,000 jobs in 2025based on tracking data from Layoffs.fyi and TrueUp. Another 59,000 have left in the first three months of 2026.
The graduates who entered this market did so having I watched as a larger group was hired, promoted, and then fired. in companies like Meta, Amazon and Google in the span of 18 months. The lesson they learned was not subtle: competition and loyalty are not enough protection. And so they came armed with a technology that their universities had spent four years telling them to learn.
The tools and the companies that sell them.
The phenomenon emerged 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 through GlobeNewswire, was presented as a trending article on 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 generated by AI, and independent reviewers have noted that the software can be visible to interviewers when candidates switch windows. A Gartner survey of 3,000 job applicants found that six percent admitted to engaging in interview fraud, including having someone else impersonate them. Fifty-nine percent of hiring managers suspect that candidates use 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 percent of employers characterized the labor market for the class of 2026 as “fair,” up from “good” the previous year. New graduate hiring projections are essentially flat, with growth of 1.6 percent. For candidates who submit dozens of applications and receive interview invitations at rates of less than two percent, the temptation to take advantage of every available advantage is considerable.
The hypocrisy argument
The most effective argument for AI-assisted interviewing has nothing to do with fairness in the abstract. This is a specific inconsistency in how technology companies treat AI.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed during an April 2025 earnings call that more than 30 percent of the company’s new code is now generated with AI assistanceup from 25 percent six months earlier. Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta encourage their engineers to use AI coding tools daily. AI-powered applicant tracking systems scan and reject resumes before a human reads them. The hiring process is automated from end to end, except on the candidate side.
For graduates who were told during their college years that fluency in AI would define their careers, asking them to pretend the technology doesn’t exist during a 45-minute interview feels less like a competency test and more like a compliance test. The companies that ask them to do so are, in many cases, the same ones that expect them to use artificial intelligence tools from the first day of work.
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 abilities. An interview is, at least in theory, a conversation designed to assess what a candidate knows and how they think. Outsourcing those responses to a language model, or to a human trainer whispering through an earpiece, undermines the purpose of the exercise, regardless of how unfair it may be.
The employer’s response
Companies are already adapting. In-person interview rounds increased from 24 percent in 2022 to 38 percent in 2025.according to recruiting industry data. Seventy-two percent of recruiting leaders now conduct at least one in-person stage specifically to combat AI-assisted fraud. Some companies have moved to whiteboard exercises, pair programming sessions, and unstructured conversations that are harder to leverage with real-time tools.
The deeper question is whether the interview itself is the appropriate mechanism for evaluating candidates in an AI-saturated job market. If the goal is to evaluate 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 test raw cognitive ability and domain knowledge, then AI assistance defeats the purpose entirely. Most interviews try to do both, which is why the current system doesn’t satisfy anyone.
What is clear is that the Class of 2025 did not create this problem. They inherited a labor market reshaped by pandemic-era overhiring, aggressive cost-cutting and a AI revolution That is simultaneously creating and destroying opportunities at a pace that neither employers nor candidates have fully absorbed. Your decision to use AI in interviews is not a rebellion. It is the predictable behavior of rational actors in a system that has told them, repeatedly and in every other context, that AI is not optional. It’s worth examining, at the very least, the fact that the establishment now opposes taking that message seriously.
