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YES

As of 13 August 2026, AI can summarise a job interview.

This still needs a person who signs their name to it.

Can you do it?

5 minutesto a draft.

30 minutesto something you’d act on.

Cost, all in£0

Skill neededchat-fluent

Who has to check ita colleague

What the alternative costsOtter.ai is a specialist AI meeting-notes tool that records, transcribes and summarises meetings automatically.

If this goes wrong, an omission or invented interpretation can distort the interview record and influence an employment decision.

What to actually do

  1. Hand it to a person

    The route this page recommends

    A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

  2. Use a tool built for this

    Second choice

  3. Do it yourself

    The distant third

    A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

    How to actually do it

    1. Open the interview transcript or your contemporaneous interview notes and remove material that you are not authorised to share with an AI tool.
    2. Add the role title and interview stage to the prompt, then paste the transcript or notes into the marked section.
    3. Paste the complete prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask it to produce the structured summary.
    4. Open the source transcript or notes beside the AI response and compare every answer, concern and evidence point with the original wording.
    5. Delete any invented detail, unsupported inference or comment about a protected characteristic, and restore any material omission from the source.
    6. Send the checked summary to the agreed hiring-record location and ask a colleague involved in the process to confirm that it is accurate and fair before it informs a decision.

    Prompt

    Summarise the job interview transcript or notes below for the hiring record. Use only information explicitly stated in the source. Do not invent, infer or fill gaps. Separate the output into: 1) candidate's relevant experience and evidence, 2) answers to each question, 3) skills or behaviours evidenced, 4) concerns or unanswered points, 5) follow-up questions, and 6) a short factual summary. Label statements as coming from the candidate or interviewer where that is clear. Preserve important qualifications, uncertainty and conflicting answers. Do not assess protected characteristics, diagnose personality, make a hiring recommendation, rank the candidate, or turn impressions into facts. If the source does not support a point, write "Not stated". After the summary, list any claims that need checking against the source. I have permission to use this material: [yes or no]. Role: [role title]. Interview stage: [stage]. Transcript or notes: [paste material here].

    Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

What it gets wrong

  • AI cannot know whether an apparently minor omission changes the meaning of an answer.
  • AI turns tone, hesitation and interviewer impressions into neat prose that may sound more certain than the interview was.
  • AI cannot decide which evidence is genuinely relevant to the role without the hiring context you hold.
  • AI cannot take responsibility for an inaccurate record or for an employment decision based on it.
  • AI cannot establish that recording, transcription and sharing of the interview are authorised in your organisation.

Even on a YES, the friction has a name: judgement under ambiguity, verification cost and stakes of error.

How we scored this

Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.

AxisScore (0–2)
Output2
Inputs2
Verification1
Liability1
Effort delta2
Total8 / 10

The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.

FAQ

Can AI summarise an interview transcript?
Yes. Give it a transcript or detailed notes and instruct it to use only stated information, separate evidence from unanswered points, and make no hiring recommendation. You still need to compare the result with the source.
Can AI record and summarise a job interview?
Tools such as Otter.ai can record, transcribe and summarise meetings automatically. Do not record or upload an interview unless the people and organisation involved have authorised that use.
Is it safe to use AI for interview notes?
It can help with a checked draft, but it is not safe to treat the output as the official record without checking it. Use only material you are authorised to share, remove unsupported inferences, and keep a human accountable for how the notes affect the candidate.
Can AI decide who performed best in an interview?
AI can organise answers against criteria you provide, but it should not own the decision or turn ambiguous impressions into facts. A suitably briefed human hiring panel must assess the evidence and remain responsible for the outcome.

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Assessed by gpt-5.6-luna (gpt-5.6-luna) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.

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