Generative AI is making hiring easier to game. A career adviser warns that AI-written résumés can invent skills, and a Harvard Business Review article says the technology is weakening the old screening signals employers once leaned on.
Robin Ryan, a career counselor and author writing in Forbes on Jan. 13, 2026, said one client, identified as Dylan, used ChatGPT to rewrite his résumé and wound up with a document listing work he hadn’t done. That mistake, Ryan said, was an AI “hallucination,” the kind of error where systems simply make things up.
And the risk isn’t just for younger applicants. Ryan said plenty of job seekers use AI to polish their résumés, only to get copy that’s bland and still misses the outcomes employers want to see, like cost savings, revenue growth, productivity gains or improved customer service.
The Forbes piece said AI can’t ask the right questions, and it can’t infer achievements that were never handed over. Ryan said job seekers often stack weak bullet points because they’re focused on duties, not outcomes, which leaves recruiters with a job description instead of proof of performance.
The bigger hiring mess was flagged by Shraddha Sunil and Mudit Saraf in a June 8, 2026 Harvard Business Review article. They said generative AI is quickly wearing down the reliability of traditional hiring signals, and polished résumés plus structured interview answers are getting easier for candidates to manufacture whether or not they can actually do the work.
The article said the ability to perform well in interviews is becoming “infinitely scalable and practically free,” and that creates a headache for recruiters and companies trying to judge real ability. Sunil is an engineer at Microsoft on the Azure Local team and a cofounder of MeetGinger, while Saraf is an engineer at Meta Reality Labs and also a cofounder of MeetGinger.
Ryan said the safest move for applicants is to treat AI as a drafting aid, not the author. She advised job seekers to go back through their own experience, pin down specific outcomes and make sure the résumé shows what changed because of their work.
That means asking practical questions, Ryan wrote: what was accomplished, what improved, what problem was solved, and what value was created. Hiring managers want proof of results, she said, not a laundry list of responsibilities.
Sunil and Saraf argued in HBR that employers have to change the way they screen candidates too, because résumé polish and interview fluency aren’t reliable stand-ins for competence anymore. They framed it as a system-wide hiring problem, not just a candidate behavior problem.
For recruiters, the price is time and trust. If an applicant gets screened in on the basis of invented experience, the mismatch may not show up until later, after interviews or an offer-stage review.
Ryan’s warning was plain. If a résumé says someone did work they never performed, the candidate may have to admit misrepresentation in front of a recruiter, and that can kill a job opportunity immediately.
