New Harvard Business Review article.
AI is now breaking hiring at both ends, with résumés becoming easier to fake and remote interviews becoming easier to script live.
Hiring systems now reward people who can perform the hiring process, not always people who can do the work.
The old résumé signal is weakening because candidates can generate polished, keyword-heavy applications in minutes, while AI screeners may favor text that looks like AI output, with one cited study finding 23% to 60% higher shortlisting for model-like résumés.
Remote first-round interviews are also losing trust because live AI assistants can suggest answers during calls, especially for predictable behavioral questions like conflict stories, motivation answers, and rehearsed career narratives.
The damage is not only false positives, where weak candidates look strong, but false negatives, where unconventional candidates never get seen because their documents are less optimized than their thinking.
They propose replacing predictable first-round questions with live work-simulation prompts where the interviewer changes the facts mid-answer, asks the candidate to defend tradeoffs, and checks whether their reasoning stays coherent.
A practical version is: give a messy job-relevant scenario, ask for a decision, then add a surprise constraint or contradiction and make the candidate revise their answer out loud.
