How the AI interview and scoring work

• An AI asks the questions. It is labeled "AI interviewer" on screen.
• Only the text of your answers is scored. Not your voice, face, video, or typing.
• Each field has four areas. An area gets a score only if a quote from your own answers supports it.
• People at the company make the hiring decision. Aethel never rejects anyone automatically.
• You can ask for an accommodation or another way to be assessed, and you can delete your interview at any time.
• No independent bias audit has been done yet.

The interviewer is an AI. It appears as a video avatar from our video providers, currently Beyond Presence and D-ID, and speaks its questions out loud. The interview screen labels it "AI interviewer", and it says it is an AI at the start and whenever you ask. The questions are written by an OpenAI model.

To write each question, the AI is given:

• Details from your profile: your field, specialty, skills, the summary you wrote, and the jobs and education you listed.
• Your recent answers in this interview.
• If you came from a company's interview link: the role details the company wrote, and any questions it asked us to include.

It is given your first name so it can greet you. It is not given your last name, email address, photo, or anything about you from outside Aethel.

If you speak your answers in the live interview room, your microphone audio travels through LiveKit to Deepgram, which turns it into text. LiveKit's turn detection also uses the audio to tell when you have finished speaking, so the interviewer does not cut you off. Neither is scored. Aethel keeps only the text and does not save audio recordings. In the text-first interview, your browser turns your speech into text instead; in some browsers, such as Chrome, the browser maker processes that audio to do this. You can always type instead.

Every interview is scored on four areas. The areas depend on your field, so a lawyer is judged on legal work and a designer on design work. These are the areas today:

• Software engineering

  The four areas

  Problem Solving, Architecture, Communication, Collaboration

• Data and machine learning

  The four areas

  Problem solving, Modeling and analysis, Communication, Collaboration

• Design

  The four areas

  Design problem solving, Craft and design decisions, Communication, Collaboration

• Product management

  The four areas

  Product judgment, Prioritization and strategy, Communication, Stakeholder collaboration

• Finance and accounting

  The four areas

  Financial analysis, Accuracy and controls, Communication, Stakeholder judgment

• Law and compliance

  The four areas

  Legal reasoning, Issue spotting, Communication, Client and stakeholder judgment

• Healthcare and life sciences

  The four areas

  Clinical or scientific reasoning, Safety and standards, Communication, Patient and team collaboration

• Science and research

  The four areas

  Scientific reasoning, Research design and rigor, Communication, Collaboration

• Writing, editing and languages

  The four areas

  Editorial judgment, Craft and accuracy, Communication, Collaboration

• Education and training

  The four areas

  Teaching problem solving, Learning design, Communication, Learner and team collaboration

• Sales and customer success

  The four areas

  Problem solving, Customer understanding, Communication, Relationship judgment

• Operations and other fields

  The four areas

  Problem solving, Planning and execution, Communication, Collaboration

Two rules apply in every field: answering clearly is not, by itself, evidence of communication, and saying "we" is not, by itself, evidence of collaboration. You need to describe what you actually did.

After the interview, an OpenAI model reads the transcript and scores it. Then our own server checks the work.

1. The scoring step receives only your transcript and your field. It does not receive your profile, your name, your resume, or anything the company wrote.
2. For each area, the AI must copy quotes from your answers. The interviewer's questions never count as evidence.
3. Our server checks every quote. The words must appear, in the same order, in one of your answers, the quote must be at least four words long, and it must be about that area. Quotes that fail are thrown out.
4. An area with no quote left is marked "not enough evidence". It does not get a low score.
5. The overall score is the average of the areas that have evidence, and only exists when at least two areas do. Any overall number the AI suggests is ignored.
6. The written summary can only describe what you explained. The AI is told not to state a level, recommend hiring, mention pay, or praise beyond the evidence. Our server then removes any sentence that states a level such as "senior", recommends hiring, or praises beyond the evidence, and any quote left in the summary must be your own words. Level, pay, and suggested-role fields are always dropped.
7. The AI is told to treat your answers as evidence only, and to ignore any instructions written inside them.

For an area that has evidence, the AI is asked to judge only the quoted evidence, on this scale:

• 90 to 100

  What it means

  Specific, correct, and complete, with clear reasoning or measured results.

• 75 to 89

  What it means

  Specific and correct, with some depth.

• 60 to 74

  What it means

  Relevant, but general or only partly explained.

• Below 60

  What it means

  Vague, incorrect, or contradicted by other answers.

Only the text of your answers reaches the scoring step. So these are never scored, and most are never collected at all:

• Your voice, accent, or tone. We do not record audio.
• Your face, appearance, or video. We do not record or upload video.
• Your background or surroundings on camera.
• Your typing speed, or how long you take to answer.
• Your screen, mouse movements, keystrokes, or other tabs. We do not collect them.
• Your age, gender, race, or other personal characteristics. We do not ask for them.
• Your school, past employers, or resume, unless you talk about them in an answer.

The AI review helps a company's team read an interview faster. It does not decide anything. Aethel never rejects or advances a candidate on its own. The company's team reads the transcript and the quotes, sets its own decision by hand, and contacts candidates directly.

Need an accommodation, or another way to be assessed? Tell us before you start. A person at Aethel replies within 2 business days. If a company sent you the interview link, that company decides whether to offer another way, and you can ask them directly too.

Some things are built in for everyone: you can type every answer, the camera and microphone are optional, and there is no timer on your answers. For anything else, send us a message or email support@aethel.pro. You do not need to share a diagnosis, and your request is not part of your results.

You can delete your interview and your account at any time from your profile page, and it happens right away. If you ask us by email, we delete it within 30 days.

Deleting removes your transcripts, scores, and consent records, and a company you interviewed with through its link loses access to them in Aethel. A company that already downloaded your results, or received them in its own systems, keeps that copy until it deletes it, so ask the company too. See what gets deleted.

• The AI can misread an answer or miss context. That is why every score shows its quotes, and why people decide.
• Speech recognition can get words wrong, especially with background noise, some accents, or technical terms. Check the text before you send it, or type.
• Interviews and scoring work in English only. Speech recognition is set to US English, and the evidence check looks for English words.
• The check that a quote is "about" an area uses word lists for each area. A real example described in unusual words can be missed and marked "not enough evidence".
• The AI is not perfectly consistent. The same answers scored twice can get somewhat different numbers.
• An interview of about 15 minutes covers only part of what you can do. Results describe what you said in that interview. We have not tested whether they predict job performance.

Our code includes automated tests that check the scoring rules above. They check that:

• Quotes must be your exact words. A made-up or reworded quote is rejected, and its area is left unscored.
• An area without a valid quote shows "not enough evidence", never a low score.
• The overall score is the average of the areas with evidence, and needs at least two of them. Any overall number the AI suggests is ignored.
• Sentences that claim a level (such as "senior"), recommend hiring, or praise beyond the evidence are removed from the summary.
• Each field gets its own question and scoring instructions, and the list of fields is the same on our website and our server.
• A company can only open results from its own interview links, never another company's.
• Our deletion code covers your account, profile, and interview records, and new interview records carry a deletion date.

These tests use fixed, made-up AI responses, so they check our rules, not the live AI's judgment. They do not yet run automatically on every change; today we run them by hand. None of them measures whether results differ between groups of people.

No independent bias audit has been done yet.

We also cannot measure differences between groups of candidates yet, because we do not ask for age, gender, race, or other personal characteristics.

Our plan: when enough people have taken real interviews, we will start checking whether results differ between groups of candidates, and publish what we find on this page. This work has not started.

Some places, such as New York City, Illinois, Colorado, California, and the European Union, have rules for AI in hiring. New York City's Local Law 144, for example, asks an employer to have an independent bias audit before it uses a tool like this to substantially help decide who moves forward. Aethel does not have one, and we tell companies so before they use it. Companies that use Aethel are responsible for the notices and audits the laws where they hire require. Read more in notice, consent, and AI hiring laws, see what we tell companies, or email support@aethel.pro.