Your résumé just became less believable

Good morning. Thanks for reading Still Monday again. Keep voting, replying and sending it to the manager who has conducted 43 interviews and still says things like:

“I just want to get a feel for the person.”

Today we have a small hiring problem.

Résumés got better.

Interview answers got better.

Work samples got better.

Now employers have to figure out whether the candidate did too.

Let’s get to work.

Two candidates apply for a job.

Both have polished résumés.

Both write excellent cover letters.

Both interview well.

Both provide thoughtful examples of previous work.

Five years ago, those were useful signals.

Today they may also demonstrate excellent access to software.

Western Governors University recently surveyed 3,128 U.S. hiring professionals. Sixty percent said AI has made candidates’ real skills harder to evaluate. Nearly one in five named difficulty confirming whether they were interacting with a person or AI as a major challenge. Western Governors University

That does not mean every candidate is cheating.

AI can legitimately help somebody communicate experience better, practice an interview or clean up writing.

The problem is more fundamental.

Employers used to treat communication quality as a partial proxy for ability.

Now producing something polished is much cheaper.

The signal weakened.

And when a signal gets weaker, hiring systems have to find another one.

Palo Alto Networks is already experimenting with that.

Its chief people officer recently said the cybersecurity company is moving away from interviews based primarily on candidates recounting achievements. Instead, it uses observable interviews and hackathons to watch how applicants actually approach problems—with and without AI. Fortune

That may become a much bigger shift than rewriting job descriptions.

Hiring traditionally rewards people who are good at explaining what they can do.

The next version may reward people who can show it.

WGU’s research found that 42% of employers plan to increase their focus on skills over degrees, while 76% said work experience was equal to or more valuable than a degree. At the same time, 73% still value college degrees and 91% value certificates. Western Governors University

So this is not a clean switch from credentials to skills.

Employers increasingly want several signals pointing in the same direction.

Education says you learned something.

Experience says somebody previously trusted you to use it.

A work sample says you can actually do it.

For hiring managers, this has one enormous advantage.

You can stop trying to read minds.

Instead of asking a candidate:

Tell me about a time you solved a difficult customer problem.

Give them a realistic customer problem.

Then watch what happens.

Candidates benefit too.

People with unusual backgrounds, nonlinear careers or less impressive company names can compete using evidence instead of pedigree.

The challenge is designing assessments that are short, relevant and respectful.

Nobody needs a candidate building a free three-week marketing strategy to earn the privilege of receiving a rejection email.

A useful work sample resembles the actual job, takes limited time and has the same scoring criteria for everyone.

The interview can then do something interviews are actually good at:

Understanding the person behind the work.

The share of hiring professionals in WGU’s research who said they were still figuring out how to assess candidates’ AI skills doubled from 16% in 2025 to 32% in 2026. Western Governors University

Apparently adding “AI proficiency” to the job description was the easy part.

Among employers who said AI has made candidate skills harder to evaluate, 54% also reported that AI had reduced entry-level hiring at their organization, compared with 20% among employers who did not report the same evaluation problem. WGU explicitly notes that this association does not prove causation. Western Governors University

The first job now requires experience.

And forensic analysis.

The company says it is increasingly using observable interviews and hackathons rather than relying entirely on candidates’ stories about previous achievements. Fortune

“I’m a strategic thinker.”

Excellent.

Here is strategy: Think.

Our sponsors help keep Still Monday free

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text you can send the moment you stop talking. No rough transcription you have to clean up. Actual polished text, ready for email, Slack, or any app.

Speak the way you think. Go on tangents. Change your mind mid-sentence. Flow strips the filler, fixes the grammar, and gives you text that reads like you spent five minutes writing it.

Start flowing free

Pick the most important thing a new hire must be able to do during the first 90 days.

Create one short exercise that reveals it.

A salesperson might review a mock account and plan the first conversation. An operations candidate could diagnose a broken workflow. A manager could prioritize five competing problems. A marketer could critique an existing campaign rather than create a free campaign from scratch.

Score the same dimensions for every candidate.

You will learn more from twenty minutes of observed thinking than from another hour asking where they see themselves in five years.

Companies often respond to uncertainty by adding interviews.

Eventually you have reduced hiring risk by exhausting every qualified candidate.

Better evidence should reduce process, not expand it.

If a work sample gives you a stronger signal, use it to remove something weaker.

Our sponsors help keep Still Monday free

Every agent handling refunds, account changes, or tickets needs three answers: what it can pick up, what it's allowed to do, and when it hands back. Running Agents in Customer Work is four conversations on agentic AI in customer ops. Register now, four Tuesdays, 10 a.m. PT.

Register now

CANDIDATE: Strategic problem solving, cross-functional leadership and adaptability.

INTERVIEWER: Great. Show me.

CANDIDATE: Show you?

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

CANDIDATE: …

INTERVIEWER: This part wasn’t in the interview-prep prompt, was it?

If polished words become easier to manufacture, employers may pay more attention to how somebody thinks, interacts, decides and performs.

Those were always the things they were trying to predict.

The résumé was just a shortcut.

Vote below.

And send this to somebody hiring right now—or somebody preparing for an interview.

One of them should probably stop practicing answers.

The other should probably stop asking them.

Technically Wednesday. Emotionally “walk me through your thinking.”.

— The Still Monday Desk