Job hunting has become an AI arms race. Candidates use assistants to tailor resumes and draft cover letters in minutes. Employers, flooded with applications, use AI to screen and rank them. Both sides benefit from the speed, and both risk losing the human judgment that makes hiring work.
Updated September 2026: we added sources on Amazon’s abandoned hiring tool and New York City’s audit law, and the new EU date for high-risk hiring AI.
For candidates: using AI well
Tailor, do not fabricate. AI is excellent at matching your real experience to a job description: highlighting relevant skills, suggesting keywords and tightening bullet points. It must never invent experience, qualifications or results. Anything on your application can come up in an interview or background check.
Make it sound like you. Recruiters report seeing large numbers of generic, AI-polished cover letters. Give the assistant specific stories and details from your own career, then edit the draft in your own voice.
Research the company. Use AI to summarize a company’s public information and prepare thoughtful questions, and verify key facts on the company’s own site.
Practice interviews. Ask an assistant to run a mock interview for the specific role, ask follow-up questions and give feedback on your answers. Voice mode makes this feel closer to the real thing.
Prompt for resume tailoring Here is my resume and a job description. Suggest how to reorder and reword my existing experience to match the role. Do not add any skills or achievements I have not listed. Flag any requirements I do not appear to meet.
For employers: using AI responsibly
AI can help recruiters write clearer job descriptions, schedule interviews, answer candidate questions and summarize applications. Screening and ranking candidates is more sensitive.
- Bias risk. AI trained on past hiring decisions can reproduce historical biases. A well-known example is Amazon’s experimental recruiting tool, which the company reportedly abandoned years ago after finding it penalized resumes associated with women (AI Incident Database).
- Regulation. Hiring AI is considered high-risk under the EU AI Act. New York City’s Local Law 144 has required bias audits and notice to candidates for certain automated employment decision tools since July 2023, and other US states have introduced rules. After the EU’s 2026 amendments, the Act’s high-risk requirements for stand-alone systems such as hiring AI apply from December 2027.
- Human decisions. Keep people responsible for final hiring decisions and make sure qualified candidates are not filtered out by rigid keyword matching.
- Transparency. Tell candidates when AI is used in the process.
Our AI policy guide can help set internal rules.
For both: the authenticity problem
When everyone uses AI to polish applications, polish stops being a signal. Employers increasingly value evidence that is hard to fake: portfolios, work samples, references and live conversations. For candidates, that means your real accomplishments and how you talk about them matter more, not less.
Honesty on both sides
For job seekers, AI is a powerful editing and practice tool, as long as everything it helps you say is true. For employers, it can speed up the process, but decisions about people deserve human judgment, fairness checks and transparency.
Sources
- Incident 37: Amazon’s Experimental Hiring Tool Allegedly Displayed Gender Bias in Candidate Rankings, AI Incident Database
- Automated Employment Decision Tools, NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection
- Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), EUR-Lex
- EU AI Omnibus enters into force, amending the AI Act, White & Case, July 2026
