Most US candidates who faced an AI interview say they weren’t told it was coming. Fix it in the invite.

Seventy percent of US candidates who had been through an AI interview say it was not clearly disclosed before their most recent one. For one in five, the first hint was the interview itself starting. That is from Greenhouse’s 2026 survey of job seekers. It sits next to a costlier one: 38% of US candidates have withdrawn from a hiring process because it included an AI interview. The US sample was 1,200 of the survey’s 2,950 respondents.

That second figure is the one a staffing desk should care about. A candidate who quits at the invite never shows up in your funnel as a rejection. They show up as silence, and high-volume hiring already has plenty of that.

The same survey says people are not against the technology: only 19% of US candidates want less AI involvement than there is today. What they object to is how it is used. The top reasons for abandoning a process are a pre-recorded interview scored by AI with no human present (33%) and a company failing to disclose how AI would be used (27%). Both are process problems. This post starts with the second, and it starts with a single email.

What candidates asked for

Greenhouse sells hiring software, so read its survey as a vendor’s survey. It also reports what US candidates want changed. The asks are specific, and none of them needs new technology.

Two more numbers frame the ask. 57% of US candidates think companies should be legally required to disclose when AI evaluates them, and 51% of those who finished an AI interview never received an outcome. Disclosure, explanation, a person, a reply. Candidates asked for the first three; the fourth is a gap they report. All four are cheap.

Where the rules already say tell them

You do not have to wait for a law to do this, and in some places a law has already arrived. Three are worth knowing if you hire in Illinois or New York City. The table puts them side by side.

Staffing agencies should read the third row twice, because the New York text names employment agencies directly. Whether your agency counts as the employer for a given placement under the Illinois laws is a question for counsel. So are two scope points. The Illinois video act is written for recorded video interviews analyzed by AI, so whether a voice-only screen falls inside it is open. And the New York law applies to tools that meet its definition of an automated employment decision tool, which the table does not reproduce.

Put the first notice in the invite, not on the interview screen

Our position: the first notice belongs in the message that carries the link, not on the screen behind the start button.

By the time someone reaches the interview screen, they have stopped what they were doing, found a quiet spot and maybe waited for a callback. A surprise there feels like a trap, not a notice. Greenhouse reports that for one in five, the first they knew of AI was once the interview had started. Someone deciding whether to spend ten minutes on their phone tonight needs the facts before they spend the time, not after.

The interview screen still has a job. It runs a plain consent step before anything is recorded, with a visible way out. Where a law requires consent first, that step is the one it points at. But it is the second notice, not the first.

If your tool only discloses behind the start button, move it. The fix is one paragraph in an email template.

The five lines every AI interview invite needs

Below is a sample invite for a Home Care Aide role. Square brackets are yours to fill in. The numbers mark the five lines that carry the disclosure, and the notes say why each one is there.

Measure what the disclosure costs, and what silence costs

Disclosure will cost you something. Some candidates will read line 1 and close the email. We have not measured how many, because ScreenWith AI has not launched, and we are not going to borrow a number from someone else’s funnel. The way to find out is a two-week test on one role.

Send the five-line invite to half the applicants and your old invite to the other half, then compare four numbers. Most funnels can give you the first two today. The last two usually take a manual count.

Judge the test on finished interviews that a recruiter accepted, not on starts. A disclosure that loses a few starts and gains more finished, reviewed interviews is a good trade. One that only moves the start rate is noise.

Close the loop after the interview

The last number deserves its own paragraph, because it is the cheapest fix and the one most teams skip. An automated note sent the minute the interview ends, saying “we have your answers and you will hear from us by Friday,” is the easy half. The hard half is sending the outcome by Friday. A decline is still an answer, and it is kinder than silence.

ScreenWith AI is not live yet, so everything above is a standard rather than a result. The invite we plan to ship will carry the five lines by default, because we would rather get the disclosure right first and tune the completion rate second. To see how a scorecard marks a requirement it could not establish, there is a sample on the AI interviewer page. You do not need our tool to start: paste the five lines into your current invite template this week.