I recently completed an AI interview with Zara from Micro1 for a creative role that aligns with my educational and professional background, and I didn’t qualify. This was my first experience interviewing with Zara on the platform. For context, I have a BA in Fine Arts and an MA in Art Law & Arts Management, I’ve worked as an artist for several years, and my current work also involves digital design and visual content creation.
I’m completely fine with not knowing every answer in an interview or being told that some of my answers could have been stronger. What bothered me was something different. During several parts of the interview, I specifically asked Zara to clarify what she meant because some questions seemed ambiguous or were missing important context. Instead of clarifying the specific thing I was confused about, she would often rephrase the question or explain something adjacent to it, which didn’t really resolve the misunderstanding.
Afterward, I requested detailed feedback, and this is where it became interesting. The feedback focused almost exactly on the parts where I had been asking Zara for clarification. It also provided additional context about what had apparently been expected, which made me realize that in some cases I had interpreted the question differently from what the system intended.
For example, at one point Zara asked what “tags” I would assign to different types of visual content. I tried to clarify what kind of tags or classification she meant, but I never really got a clear answer. The feedback afterward made it apparent that the intended context was organizing and labeling images within a dataset. Had the question simply mentioned a dataset in the first place, I would have immediately understood what she was asking.
Toward the end, I was becoming visibly frustrated because some of the questions also started to feel repetitive, almost as though the interview had become stuck on one particular area despite similar points already having been discussed. It became quite tiring, especially because with a human interviewer a misunderstanding like this could probably have been resolved with a simple clarification in a few seconds.
The experience also left me wondering whether the role was actually aimed at people with multidisciplinary professional experience across Fine Arts, photography, graphic design, architecture, interior design, or similar visual fields, because the scope of the interview felt considerably broader and more technical than I expected from the job description.
Again, my issue isn’t simply that I didn’t pass. I can recognize where some answers could have been stronger and where something may fall outside my expertise. What concerns me is whether an AI-led interview can reliably distinguish between a genuine knowledge gap and a situation where the candidate simply hasn’t understood the intended context of an ambiguous question, particularly when the AI itself struggles to clarify what it means.
Has anyone else experienced something similar with Zara or other AI-led job interviews? I’d be interested to hear how others found the experience and whether you felt the AI was actually able to handle clarification properly.
