Artificial intelligence is profoundly affecting the profession at all levels, and the hiring landscape is no exception.
With generative AI tools becoming increasingly sophisticated, candidates can craft polished résumés, optimize applications, and prepare and rehearse interview responses. But their use of AI tools can create increased challenges for hiring managers, and that’s where professional skepticism comes into play.
“If AI helps them to tell their story properly, that’s fantastic. Now, where it gets tricky is when the tool stops editing and polishing and starts inventing new experience,” said Linda Muneka, Vice President for Robert Half’s Management Resources practice.
On this episode of the Reshaping Finance, we discuss an essential question: Can We Still Trust the Resume? Hiring in the Age of Generative AI and explore how AI is changing the hiring process.
For candidates, AI tools have given everyone a “professional writer” for their résumé, leading to increasingly keyword-optimized résumés that start to sound more and more similar. In a new hiring reality, employers need to look beyond the surface. “The new signal that we look for is specificity,” said Muneka. Hiring managers want concrete examples, detailed project stories, and evidence of genuine experience ¾ details that can’t easily be generated by AI.
Employers are looking beyond AI-polished applications
AI can improve communication, but it can also blur the line between fact and fiction through hallucinations. More than ever, finance professionals are challenged to separate truth from embellishment, and sometimes outright fabrication.
“When counterfeit money gets good, the cashier starts holding every single bill up to the light during the transaction to make sure that they're in fact real,” said Muneka. “That's where hiring is at right now because some applications are embellished. Employers have to check all of them more carefully.”
As a result of using AI tools, résumés are more polished but also sound more similar. Hiring managers now need to place greater weight on interviews, follow-up questions, and evidence of real experience. The problem is less about candidate quality and more about navigating a sea of AI-assisted applications.
Professional skepticism is a competitive advantage
AI can be used as an editor, a coach, or a way to streamline mundane tasks, but it should not become a ghostwriter for experience you don’t have. “If you can’t confidently discuss, explain, or demonstrate something that’s on your résumé, then it shouldn’t be on it,” Muneka said.
Finance professionals already have a critical advantage: the habit of questioning, verifying, and looking beneath the surface. That professional skepticism should be applied to every source of information, whether it is a résumé, a report, or an AI-generated recommendation.
Even as AI capabilities improve and become more accurate, human oversight is essential. “The more convincing the output gets, the more valuable the person who knows which cell to click into,” Muneka said.
Hiring managers must keep verifying accuracy, challenging assumptions, seeking evidence, and applying critical thinking rather than accepting information at face value.
For more insights into AI’s impact on hiring and how managers can find truly qualified candidates, hear the full conversation on the Reshaping Finance.
Additional resources:
AI and Recruiting: How Finance and Accounting Leaders Can Reduce Hiring Risk
Reimagining Performance: Incentive Design for Human-AI Collaboration
AI and the Changing Way of Working Part 1: How AI Redefines Management Accounting
AI in the Public Sector: A Force for Good? Or an Evolving Cautionary Tale?