Artificial intelligence and automation are fueling an escalating standoff in hiring — and both sides are showing strain.
Job seekers struggle to stand out in processes increasingly mediated by machines that screen, rank, and interview candidates. Employers, meanwhile, are inundated with applicants leveraging AI-enabled tools to mass-apply, tailor resumes, and even auto-generate interview responses in real time.
Technology meant to streamline hiring — tools that have indeed delivered significant efficiencies — inadvertently created a monster of a process that’s at risk of eroding trust, fairness, and human judgment. For many, the hiring experience has become more frustrating, impersonal, and vulnerable to gaming.
According to the 2025 SHRM Benchmarking Survey, average cost-per-hire and time-to-hire have both increased in the past three years — a period correlating with increased use of generative AI.
“The AI arms race does not benefit either side,” said Nichol Bradford, executive in residence for AI+HI at SHRM. “Recruiters can’t go through thousands of applications. Job seekers are demoralized to never hear from a human.”
Leaders must recalibrate how they use AI. The future of hiring will depend on rebalancing automation with human discernment — using AI for increased insight, not substitution — before this AI escalation degenerates into bots screening resumes submitted by other bots and humanity is lost from the hiring process entirely.
"We can’t let the human stuff go in HR, recruiting, or hiring because that is where we’ll feel the loss the most."
Ben Eubanks
SHRM-SCP, Chief Research Officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory in Huntsville, Ala.
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27% of CEOs identified attracting top talent as one of their top three priorities for the next 12 months, behind only adopting artificial intelligence (40%) and revenue growth (31%).
2026 CEO Priorities and Perspectives, SHRM
The Automation Standoff
Recruiting has always been about relationships — and rapport isn’t derived from efficiency and speed, said Ben Eubanks, SHRM-SCP, chief research officer at Lighthouse Research & Advisory in Huntsville, Ala.
“There is no future where candidates using AI to beat AI creates a better outcome for hiring,” he said. “There are positive use cases for AI to better understand candidates and make the process more efficient. But if employers are using AI purely to avoid human interaction and make things faster, they will create a negative set of outcomes. Of all the different business processes, recruiting and hiring needs the human connection to be strong.”
Hiring has reached an inflection point, agreed Jamie Kohn, senior director of research at advisory firm Gartner. “We are trying to make the process better, but at the same time, the technology is making the process worse,” she said. “It will take time to figure out where we should use technology and where humans should be more involved.”
Of all the risks tied to over-automation, the most detrimental outcomes result from prioritizing speed over caliber, experts agree.
“When we push too much for efficiency, quality can suffer,” Kohn said. “Some companies that created hyper-efficient application processes are adding friction back into the process to make sure they are taking the time to get the right candidates for the role.”
Those strategically placed obstacles include longer applications, more human screening, and skills assessments.
That said, there are exceptions. For front-line or hourly roles in hospitality or retail, for example, candidates often prioritize speed over connection. Many front-line workers want to know quickly whether they’re hired and will happily submit to AI screening to move through the process faster. In these high-volume hiring cases — supported by automated scheduling, chatbots, and virtual interviews — speed offers a competitive advantage.
Still, transparency about how AI is used — and where humans play a role — is essential.
“Companies need to do a better job setting expectations for candidates around where and how AI is being used, and they should emphasize the advantages technology has over human review,” Kohn said.
People forget how biased the strictly human process can be, she said. “When a recruiter has 200 resumes on their desk, they are not looking at all 200 resumes. They are scanning each resume for key words and picking a small selection to present to the hiring manager. AI has the potential to evaluate candidates on a much wider range of criteria and can help nontraditional candidates surface.”
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Among organizations using AI to support HR-related activities, 64% use it for recruiting, interviewing, and/or hiring.
2024 Talent Trends, SHRM
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*More than three-quarters (78%) of recruiting executives predict that job candidates will increasingly use AI applications to apply for open positions, and nearly three-quarters (73%) expect a rise in the use of AI to perform recruiting tasks.
Job Seekers Respond
Employers use AI and automation to improve efficiency and make data-driven decisions. AI is being used to write job descriptions, source candidates, screen resumes, match profiles to roles, conduct assessments, and analyze video interviews. Talent intelligence platforms provide analytics on a scale unimaginable a few years ago.
But the widespread deployment of AI has also unleashed new challenges, because candidates are turning to their own powerful tools.
An estimated 40% to 80% of job applicants use AI to write resumes, craft cover letters, and prepare for interviews — seemingly benign practices that carry unintended consequences.
“If applicants use ChatGPT to tailor a resume to a job description, employers are getting a whole lot of resumes that are basically the same,” Kohn said. “AI-enabled candidate matching is hurt, as well, because applicants are using AI to make themselves look like a much better fit than they actually are.”
Eubanks noted that new services allow candidates to pay small fees to automatically apply for jobs based on chosen criteria. “That is increasing the application volume for some employers, from thousands of resumes a month to thousands a day,” he said.
Even more concerning are cases in which job seekers have used AI to cheat assessments or assist with interview responses in real time. Deepfake interviews remain rare, but the potential damage is significant. Employers are worried about imposters using cloned voices, altered faces, or stolen identities to pass interviews, get hired and gain access to sensitive data, or inject malware into company systems.
An estimated 40% to 80% of job applicants use AI to write resumes, craft cover letters, and prepare for interviews.
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Steps for Restoring Trust in Hiring
Technology can streamline hiring, but many candidates still expect meaningful interactions. Employers can take deliberate steps to balance AI capabilities with authentic human evaluation to improve both the candidate experience and long-term outcomes.
“It’s feasible for some skills,” Kohn said. “But the value of certifications varies widely, and verifying skills is still a challenge. A skills-based approach helps most when the skills themselves aren’t changing too quickly.”
Even as employers adopt skills-based strategies, the systems that would make them seamless are not yet mature.
“In an ideal future, we’d all have a profile that contains our skills, experiences, and preferences and that would match up automatically with job openings,” Kohn said. “We’re not there yet.”
Bradford added that promising solutions are emerging, but they have yet to match the scale of the challenge.
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Technology Alone Can’t Fix Recruiting
For HR and business leaders, the core question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to deploy it responsibly — blending data-driven insights with human judgment.
“AI seems magical, but it’s not,” Eubanks said. “We need to remember that. It’s because of AI that human skills at work are more important than ever. We can’t let the human stuff go in HR, recruiting, or hiring because that is where we’ll feel the loss the most.”
But recruiting has relied on suboptimal signals for decades, Kohn added.
“Applications, resumes, and interviews have never really been great ways to see who’s most qualified for a job,” she said. “We need to rethink the process, because ways of working are changing and technology will only get you so far. What matters most is a quality outcome for both the candidate and the employer.”
Candidate expectations will continue to evolve, as well. “It used to be that doing something online instead of picking up the phone was considered rude,” Kohn said. “Then, texting was off-limits, and now it’s preferred. Those expectations will keep shifting. Right now, people see a more AI-driven process as impersonal, but in a few years, candidates may not feel that way at all.”
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19% of organizations that use automation or AI in hiring report that their tools have overlooked or screened out qualified applicants.