When the Interviewer Is a Bot: Behavior, Breakdowns, and Trust in MLLM-Led Interviews
Semi-structured interviews are a cornerstone of qualitative research but remain labor-intensive. We report an empirical study of what actually happens when the interviewer is an off-the-shelf real-time multimodal LLM (MLLM). We built InterviewBot, a voice-based interviewing system that wraps a real-time MLLM with a researcher-authored outline, and deployed it not as a novel architecture but as a research instrument for observing default MLLM interviewing behavior. In a practice study (N=15), participants completed a bot-led semi-structured interview and then a human-led reflection session about that experience. We contribute (i) a turn-level behavioral analysis of an MLLM interviewer (N_turns=428) showing that it is acknowledgment-heavy but probe-light (deepening probes account for 4.9% of all turns), and that 28.7% of question-bearing turns pack multiple questions into one turn despite an explicit one-question-at-a-time instruction; (ii) an inductive catalogue of four data-collection breakdowns (information loss, premature termination, latency, and interruption) observed in a deployed rather than simulated system; and (iii) three social dynamics from participants' reflections: disclosure calibration, where reduced social pressure coincided with shallower elaboration; institutional legitimacy, where trust tracked perceived stakes and what delegation to AI signaled about the organizer rather than conversational competence; and conversational grounding, where content-grounded paraphrase, not generic social filler, was what participants read as listening. We conclude with design implications for depth control, transparent handoffs, and non-templated listening mechanisms in human-centered interview automation.