AI-polished résumés have made job applicants harder to tell apart, recruiters say

Polished on paper, hard to read

As Virginia Business reported, generative AI (software that writes text on request) has changed what a job application tells an employer. A résumé and cover letter used to take real effort, so the finished product hinted at how capable and serious the candidate was. Now a chatbot can do most of that work in seconds.

Louis Hickman, a Virginia Tech professor who studies AI in hiring, recalls a student who couldn't get interviews until he ran his résumé through ChatGPT. The rewritten version landed him a job by the next lab meeting. Hickman says that was just before this habit became widespread.

It is widespread now. In a May report from Criteria Corp. and Lighthouse Research, 92% of recruitment leaders said AI-generated résumés are commonplace. Only one-third of the 998 employers surveyed felt highly confident that résumés show a candidate's true abilities. And 64% said they had hired someone who overstated their skills.

Both sides are automating

The problem is not only better writing. Some job seekers pay for auto-apply services that tailor a résumé to each posting and submit it with no human involved. Employers can receive hundreds of applications within an hour of posting a job.

Employers use AI too. Rob Lockard, a recruiting adviser at the Vienna firm ARC Human Capital, says a model built a candidate list for a client in about 10 minutes, turning up 400 to 500 people with some relevant background. He then narrows the list using his own experience.

Hickman calls the situation an arms race, because any screening rule an employer adopts can quickly be gamed by applicants. One example is hidden white text stuffed with keywords. Hickman says it mostly fails against a well-built screening system. Lockard adds that it can also scramble the formatting once a résumé is converted to plain text, which counts against the applicant.

Hickman sums up the result: "It's not working for either side." Applicants send out hundreds of applications without getting interviews. Employers face stacks of near-identical, impressive-looking ones.

Is the person real?

Recruiters describe tells that are easy to spot. Tom Moore of the Reston firm ROCS Grad Staffing says a résumé that looks unusually good can be a warning sign, especially when the phone call doesn't match it. Lockard says some AI-written résumés lack any story behind the listed experience. He often opens an interview by asking what in the job description drew the candidate in, and says most people whose bot applied for them admit it.

Some candidates also use AI during live interviews. Moore estimates that fewer than 10% of interviews involve someone obviously reading answers from another screen. Lockard once saw a different person turn up for the hiring-manager interview than the one who passed the screening call. Some of Moore's clients now ask IT candidates to show ID on camera.

The hardest case came from Nisos, an intelligence firm in Arlington County. A North Korean operative applied for a remote job with a résumé tailored to the posting, and nothing on paper would have tripped an ordinary filter. Nisos noticed warning signs and investigated rather than simply rejecting him. It found a group of 22 operatives who sent applications to more than 176,000 jobs and won 76 remote positions between December 2024 and September 2025, according to Magen Gicinto, the firm's chief people officer. An NBC News report from September said the money goes to North Korea's government.

Gicinto stresses that using AI is not itself the red flag. The worry is when it helps manufacture a whole candidate, from invented experience to a false identity.

Proof over polish

Nobody quoted in the piece wants to go back to paper-only hiring. Gicinto recommends building several independent checkpoints into the process. A forger can make one document look convincing, but it is much harder to keep an identity consistent across separate sources.

Hickman favours testing whether people can do what they claim. A warehouse might check whether applicants can lift boxes repeatedly. That doesn't fit every job, though, and asking senior candidates for a day or two of unpaid work is a big demand.

Human judgment still counts. Lockard has phoned candidates whose résumés were an imperfect fit and found them stronger in conversation. Moore expects some employers to advertise that real people read the résumés and run the interviews. Gicinto sees hiring moving toward proof that can be checked independently and away from documents that merely look genuine.