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An AI interview is increasingly the first step of a hiring process. Since there’s no human on the other end, candidates are scheduling them whenever—even deep into the night.

When Tim Millard received an email about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he’d speak to a human. When he was instead instructed to record himself answering a series of questions on camera, he felt a familiar pang of resignation—one that had followed him throughout the job hunt .

“I figured, I have to do this if I want to be considered for the job,” Millard tells WIRED. So, that evening, the Atlanta-based communications and marketing expert tidied his living room and set up his laptop. The email had left the timing for the interview open-ended, and he figured he might as well get it done as soon as possible. “What else was I going to do at 9:30 at night?”

The questions were pretty standard for the role. How would Millard pitch a story to the media? How would he cultivate relationships with local journalists? But the setup was bizarre. He sat in front of his laptop, watching as a question popped up on the screen. He had roughly half a minute to think about his response.

“Once the 30 seconds was up, ‘ding!’ Now you have two minutes to record your answer,” Millard said. “It felt so out of this world.”

Millard received an automated rejection email in March. But the experience unknowingly wedged him into a trend currently reshaping the modern job search . As automated video interviews and AI become a bigger part of the recruitment process , so do late-night interviews.

Arsham Ghahramani said that he noticed the late-night interview trend almost immediately after he cofounded and launched Ribbon, a company that makes voice-AI recruitment software. Twenty-four percent of Ribbon’s AI interviews take place between 10 pm and 2 am local time, according to data from the more than 500 companies that use the service. For his manufacturing clients, that figure jumps to 35 percent.