Name: Robots Screening Robots: Inside the AI Hiring Arms Race
Uploaded: 2026-05-29
Duration: 11 min 36 s

In 2026, AI sits on both sides of the hiring desk. Job seekers use it to perfect their resumes. Employers use it to screen those same resumes out. And caught in the middle, millions of people, especially first-time job seekers, are getting lost. Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller goes inside the AI hiring arms race, talking to the experts, economists, and executives navigating it firsthand. Entry-level job postings are down 35% since 2023. AI is now interviewing candidates before a human ever does. So what does it actually take to get hired in 2026?

Robots Screening Robots: Inside the AI Hiring Arms Race

Tech

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This has happened to me 4 times in the past month, interviewing again and again and again and getting rejected, to constantly be rejected, never hearing back, never knowing what's going on. 11,000 job applications hit LinkedIn every minute. Meanwhile, entry-level job postings are down 35% since 2023. I'll always see, say, on LinkedIn, that like thousands of people have already applied, and it's a pretty intimidating number. Candidates say AI both helps and hinders, allowing them to. resumes while screening tools are automatically filtering out candidates, making it harder to get past the AI bots. Employers saying, I don't hire entry level. In 3 to 5 years from now you're not going to have the people with 3 to 5 years of experience because you never hired them to begin with. As AI levels the playing field, it's also causing people to be left behind, and experts argue it's fundamentally changing the outlook for the US job market. We have AI interviewers interviewing AI trained candidates. It's mutually assured destruction. In the summer of 2022, we got a call from this guy Sam up in San Francisco, and Sam was calling to tell us about a brand new tool that was about to change the world forever. That Sam was Sam Altman calling about Chat GPT six months before launch. Jeremy Schieffling is a career coach who spent time inside LinkedIn, Khan Academy, and Apple. He now teaches job seekers at more than. 350 universities, how to get past the AI systems filtering them out. As an editorial director at Fortune, I focus on the trends shaping the future of work. With AI playing an increasingly outsized role, I wanted to speak to the people on the front lines of this change to learn how they're adapting and what this all means for today's job market. So pretend that I am a job seeker coming to you for advice. What are the top few things and tips you would tell me to use AI to succeed and land the job? So the first thing is, is actually to step away from the AI. Don't start by going to chat GPT, write me a cover letter. Instead, think about who you're writing to. That's a real human being that you need to understand. Where do you see the biggest mistakes that job seekers are making right now as they are using AI to maybe kind of game the system? What was once a 15% chance of getting interviewed for every online application is now a 2% chance. So what do you do? You say, I'm going to apply to more jobs than ever, especially with AI that makes it basically free to apply to as many jobs as you want. The reality is that every one of those jobs that you just applied for, you really have 0% chance of getting because you have the lowest common denominator application. Today is not about taking notes. It is about taking action. As I'm using it for writing things out, I notice it losing my voice in it. Interesting. So I think what I'm trying to do is. Fit into a formula that I'm trying to learn about specific job positions and resumes and cover letters, but at the same time trying to retain what distinguishes me. What have students been asking you the most today is what's the dark side of AI? It's taking this really unique differentiated thing which is. Talent and it's turning it into a commodity. The worst kind of product is a commodity because you have no advantage over anyone else in the marketplace. Job seeker confidence is down across the board, but among the most hard hit are first time job seekers. Entry level employment in AI exposed fields has dropped 13% since 2022. When both sides are using LLMs to do each part of the hiring process, what happens to the hiring process? What are you seeing right now? It's a much tougher environment in the macroeconomic sense, right, because you have, we've been dealing with a cooling labor market over the last 4 to 5 years at this point, and what that means is there are just fewer jobs to go around, so every job seeker out there has less variety to apply. To and they're feeling that too. So take those two things together and it's a much tougher environment, I think, for both parties in the marketplace. Are we facing a moment where in the future we're going to have a giant leadership crisis because the people who are supposed to be getting those jobs, working their way up right now, just can't? We're seeing less demand for entry level jobs. There's actually an increase in terms of wanting job seekers. that have 2 to 3 years or maybe 3 to 5 years of experience because you want them to be able to perhaps manage, use the AI tools to have a little bit of experience to be able to hop right in and hit the ground running. The problem, of course, is, to your point, it's, you're going to have a pipeline problem. One company that's famous for its leadership pipeline is the beverage giant PepsiCo. 12 PepsiCo alums currently lead Fortune 500 companies. For the people responsible for bringing this talent in on the ground floor, cutting through the AI noise and identifying potential is critical. Just because you've had a process that's been working for 40 years, why would we keep doing it that way? It can be different. What's stopping us from the future? We have a big project underway right now. It's called like GM General Manager of the Future, and we're looking at all the data we've collected for 20 years. What makes people successful? Did their data, their assessment, was it their lead indicator or actually was it the jobs we put them in? Was it the products they innovated? Was the problem they solved? And how do I reformulate that so that I can have a deep bench? A big conversation I think a lot of companies are having right now is around skills, and a lot of skills you can test for, you know, engineering ones, different process ones, but. There are a lot that you can't test for, especially ones that have to do with the human side of things, empathy, managerial skills. How do you identify how someone, their potential, what they're going to do for a manager later in their career? So PepsiCo has a rich history in doing this, and you probably see some of the media, oh, the CEO factory, that doesn't just happen over. Overnight, so we actually rely on a lot of employee data and employee profiles over, you know, like the last 50 years. What are indicators in their profile that made them successful? It's not generally their degree, although we find people who have an orientation towards business or engineering are more successful in our environment because we are a sales marketing. Culture, but we do find that there's a certain amount of hustle, ability to be open to new things, uh, critical thinking, and we use critical behavioral interviewing, right? We ask people to tell us a time when. How do we get you to tell us that story? To understand how we got here, we need to rewind to the 90s. Modern applicant tracking systems or ATS took off during the dot com era as hiring shifted from paper resumes to digital applications. The technology was built to manage the growing flood of resumes coming in from online job boards, digitizing what had long been a manual process. Just in the US alone, we averaged like almost 900,000 applicants. Can you realistically read that many or can your team realistically do that? Nearly 99% of all Fortune 500 companies use ATS platforms on a regular basis, with AI-powered mass submissions, an oversaturated market, and an increased number of fake applications. Relying on human review alone is no longer a realistic way to filter the flood. So it's clear that AI is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. Looking into the future, how do you foresee what this means for for the job hunt? So when AI first came out in 2022 and I got early access, I was like, wow, this is amazing for job seekers. Now they can apply to all these jobs and get all these opportunities. But here in 2026, AI is not just changing how we apply for jobs, it's changing the jobs that are available to us. These AI interviews are. Out of control. The latest evolution, AI interviews. Candidates are now interviewing with an AI bot before a human ever enters the loop. It's like the robots talking to the robots. But no, really, I think potentially an AI interview could be less biased than a human interview, right? It really depends on how it's been programmed. On the other hand, hiring is still inherently a very human process. You still need to have an employer and a job seeker come together and figure out this. A good match or not. So you're entrusting the AI agent to do a lot of heavy work in that setting, and it could also not be a good outcome. How are you advising your job seekers to do these interviews or not do them at all? Play it by the rules of the game. Recognize that these tools are not as complex as human brains, and so they're looking for certain things. Do you mention the specific projects that align with the role? Do you seem excited and genuine about what you're talking about? All that stuff is fed into the algorithm. But then, let's start to imagine this. Is there a way around the box, around that gatekeeper? And I think what we know to be true is that here in 2026, what was once a 10x advantage when you got a referral from someone on the inside is now a 20x advantage. Because what has AI done? It's destroyed trust in anything we see on the screen. Can you just paint a picture for me of the ideal AI job search in 2026? It would be three simple things. Number one, if you can start by understanding the skills you bring to bear, the passion that lights up those skills, and then connect that to what recruiters actually want in terms of specific job titles, you're already 10 steps ahead of the game. Number 2, focus on what works the best. If we know that referrals give you a 20x advantage, why are we wasting time with AI hacks when the human hacks are even more important than ever? And then number 3, once you get the job, don't stop the relational humanistic skills plus the AI skills on the job or what are going to help you land that next job after you're already in the building. When it's apparent that people lean into hard problems, it's super attractive for like any company. Tell us how you solved hard problems, how you resolve conflict, how you. Leaned into it. You didn't like wait for someone to do it for you. That is super attractive because we don't actually know what's coming. But we're definitely encouraging people to lean into it. Like, please use the tools. Tell us what you're learning. Uh, we need people to adopt these new ways of working. And as they adopt them, if they don't like it, I'm like, Well, don't like stew about it. Come back and tell us. Today, automated hiring can feel like a wall, but according to experts, it's also a doorway. AI is reshaping hiring, making it faster, easier, and more efficient. But as the process changes, so do the jobs themselves, making it tougher for many first-time job seekers to even get started. Still, one thing hasn't changed human connection matters. And in a job market increasingly shaped by AI, our human qualities may be what help us stand out the most. The way that I really want you using AI is AI is a compliment. A superpower that we did not have 3 years ago but now makes us even more effective and serving the world. I really do believe the American dream, the human dream period, is based on the idea that the next generation will have the chance to do more, do better than ever before. And if we can't make those connections in the workplace where people find that opportunity, we're not going to be planting that seed for those future generations.