Understanding Interviewees’ Perceptions and Behaviour towards Verbally and Non-verbally Expressive Virtual Interviewing Agents

Recent technological advancements have boosted the usage of virtual interviewing platforms where the candidates interact with a virtual interviewing agent or an avatar that has human-like behavior instead of face-to-face interviews. As a result, it is essential to understand how candidates perceive these virtual interviewing avatars and whether adding features to boost the system’s interaction makes a difference. In this work, we present the results of two studies in which a virtual interviewing avatar with verbal and non-verbal interaction capabilities was used to conduct employment interviews. We add two interactive capabilities to the avatar, namely the non-verbal gestures and the verbal follow-up questioning and compare it with a simple interviewing avatar. We analyze the differences in perception with self-rated measures and behaviour with automatically extracted audiovisual behavioural cues. The results show that the candidates speak for a longer time, feel less stressed and have a better chance to perform with verbally and non-verbally expressive virtual interviewing agents.