Career Interview Readiness in Virtual Reality (CIRVR): A Platform for Simulated Interview Training for Autistic Individuals and Their Employers

Abstract

Employment outcomes for autistic 1 individuals are often poorer relative to their neurotypical (NT) peers, resulting in a greater need for other forms of financial and social support. While a great deal of work has focused on developing interventions for autistic children, relatively less attention has been paid to directly addressing the employment challenges faced by autistic adults. One key impediment to autistic individuals securing employment is the job interview. Autistic individuals often experience anxiety in interview situations, particularly with open-ended questions and unexpected interruptions. They also exhibit atypical gaze patterns that may be perceived as, but not necessarily indicative of, disinterest or inattention. In response, we developed a closed-loop adaptive virtual reality (VR)–based job interview training platform, which we have named Career Interview Readiness in VR (CIRVR). CIRVR is designed to provide an engaging, adaptive, and individualized experience to practice and refine interviewing skills in a less anxiety-inducing virtual context. CIRVR contains a real-time physiology-based stress detection module, as well as a real-time gaze detection module, to permit individualized adaptation. We also present the first prototype of the CIRVR Dashboard, which provides visualizations of data to help autistic individuals as well as potential employers and job coaches make sense of the data gathered from interview sessions. We conducted a feasibility study with 9 autistic and 8 NT individuals to assess the preliminary usability and feasibility of CIRVR. Results showed differences in perceived usability of the system between autistic and NT participants, and higher levels of stress in autistic individuals during interviews. Participants across both groups reported satisfaction with CIRVR and the structure of the interview. These findings and feedback will support future work in improving CIRVR’s features in hopes for it to be a valuable tool to support autistic job candidates as well as their potential employers.

Collaborative Job Seeking for People with Autism: Challenges and Design Opportunities

“…Study 1 aims to understand when, why, and how people with autism collaborate in seeking jobs and when the current technology fails to support their specific collaboration needs fully. To achieve this, we defined our initial directions of inquiry as follows: (1) challenges in job seeking: what major challenges that people with autism are experiencing motivate them to seek collaboration; (2) collaboration practices: what are the common advantages and coping strategies to deal with the challenges, (3) technological limitations: what aspects of the current technology hinder the collaborative job seeking for people with autism, and (4) a wish list and desired features: what desired features should be prioritized for motivating collaborative job seeking for people with autism. We conducted open-ended semi-structured interviews as a method that allows us to personalize the questions based on the participants' experiences entailed in collaborative tasks of job seeking.…”

“…While the former approaches support underrepresented populations in general, HCI communities started to seek targeted approaches i.e., specifically built for people with autism. For instance, Adiani et al [2] developed an adaptive virtual reality-based job interview training platform, Career Interview Readiness in VR. Bills and Ng [11] developed a job-matching system to match people with autism with employers after estimating how both would rank each other.…”

Dialogue Act Classification via Transfer Learning for Automated Labeling of Interviewee Responses in Virtual Reality Job Interview Training Platforms for Autistic Individuals

“…Participants were required to be verbal, fluent in English, and at the eligible age of employment (16+ years) in the state of Tennessee, and the study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the lead author's university. Participants went through a mock interview with our career interview readiness in virtual reality (CIRVR) job interview environment with a virtual interviewer avatar [39]. During the interview simulation, the participant is seated across a desktop computer that runs the CIRVR simulation, as shown in Figure 1, where the participant can interact with CIRVR and move around the virtual space using mouse and keyboard controls.…”

“…During the development of our previous work [39], we encountered a lack of publicly available data to train a text classifier that classifies utterances into domain-independent DA that are relevant in a job interview context. Hence, in response to the aforementioned gap, we collected utterances of participants responding to questions from an interview script while interacting with our virtual job interview platform described in [39]. This data collection study resulted in a small dataset of 640 utterances.…”

“…The scope of this article is twofold: (1) to introduce a DA scheme to capture semantics of utterances in a job interview context through data collected in an experimental study with autistic individuals using our virtual reality job interview training system [39]; and (2) to present the best-performing classifier on the data. The three main contributions of this paper are (1) an original dataset comprising annotated responses to job interview questions by autistic individuals of working age, where responses are labeled using an in-house dialogue act scheme for job interviews; (2) a predictive model that takes an interview response as input and outputs the dialogue act to understand the general intent of the response; and (3) the interview script and annotation guidelines to help future developers replicate this work and collect more data.…”