The application arrives and the writing is clear and the candidate has addressed every requirement. Their experience appears relevant, their tone feels confident and their answers seem well considered. For a moment, the hiring manager feels relief; perhaps this is the person they have been waiting for, but then a quieter thought appears.
How Much of this was Written by the Candidate?
That question is becoming increasingly common as
AI in recruitment becomes more widely used by candidates and employers. Candidates can use AI to improve a CV, refine a job application and prepare interview answers. Employers can use it to screen applications, review information and reduce the time spent on repetitive recruitment tasks.
The Technology is New, but the Underlying Concern is not
Candidates have always tried to present themselves in the best possible light. They have asked friends to review applications, rehearsed interview answers with family members and carefully chosen which parts of their experience to emphasise. Some have embellished achievements, while others have omitted information they believed might count against them.
AI makes impression management faster and more sophisticated, but it did not invent it.
The real risk is not that a candidate used AI, the real risk is that the employer mistakes a polished presentation for reliable evidence.
There Is No Universal Perfect Candidate
A candidate can ask AI to help them sound like the ideal person for a role, but there is an obvious problem. The candidate does not truly know what the ideal person looks like. They may understand the job title and the broad responsibilities, but they will not know the finer details of the role, the team, the manager, the culture or the challenges the successful person will face. They will not know whether the organisation needs someone highly cautious or comfortable making decisions with incomplete information. They will not know whether the team needs a challenger, a stabiliser or someone who can calmly rebuild trust.
Even AI cannot optimise for information it does not have.
The Same Issue Applies to Candidate Assessments and Psychometric Testing
Whether AI can complete a candidate’s testing is another issue and when I tried it Chat GPT couldn’t, but let’s just say an AI could. What does the candidate tell AI what the ideal scores are for the role? What is the ideal aptitude score for the role? Is the highest possible score desirable, or might it suggest that the person will quickly become bored? What pattern of personality traits is most suitable for the team? What level of emotional intelligence is required? Even if a candidate could cheat on the tests, what is the ideal set of scores and under what time? If a candidate got 100% on a 15-minute aptitude test in 5 minutes, then that is a huge red flag.
Evidence Based Recruitment Looks Beyond Presentation
This is why an evidence-based recruitment process should never depend on one source of information; it relies on a convergence of data.
The CV offers one perspective. A structured candidate screening process adds another. Psychometric testing in recruitment provides further evidence about aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence and likely workplace behaviour. Structured interviews can then test the assumptions created earlier in the process. Reference checking may confirm or challenge the picture that has begun to emerge.
No Single Recruitment Method Needs to Carry the Entire Decision
The value comes from looking for consistency across multiple sources. When the information converges, confidence in the hiring decision increases. When it does not, the inconsistencies become useful. They show the employer where to ask better questions.
A candidate may present as highly confident during an interview, while assessment results suggest hesitation under pressure. Their CV may describe strong leadership experience, while their examples reveal that they have mostly worked independently. An AI generated job application may suggest outstanding written communication, but the screening conversation may reveal that the written style does not reflect how the candidate actually thinks or responds. These are not necessarily reasons to reject someone, but they are reasons to become curious.
Structured Interviews Turn Inconsistencies into Questions
The order of the selection process matters; screening, testing and interviewing can progressively build a clearer picture of each candidate. By the time structured interviews take place, the employer is no longer relying on instinct alone; they have evidence to explore.
This is an important part of reducing recruitment risk. Instead of asking every candidate a collection of general questions and hoping the right person stands out, the interviewer can investigate the areas that matter most. The employer can test claims, explore inconsistencies and ask candidates to describe what they did in relevant workplace situations. It becomes harder for presentation alone to carry the candidate through the selection process.
Recruitment Should Help Candidates Tell the Truth
The way the selection process is introduced matters too. Candidates are more likely to be open when they understand that recruitment is not an examination they must somehow defeat. It is a two-way decision about whether the relationship is likely to work.
Explain that the organisation is learning about the candidate while the candidate is learning about the organisation. Make it clear that nobody expects perfection. Tell them it is acceptable to have areas for development. Encourage them to be themselves because the goal is not merely to win the job; the goal is to find a job that lasts and works for everyone.
That message reduces the pressure to perform a version of the ideal candidate, and it also reveals something important about the employer.
Human Judgement in Recruitment Still Matters
Recruitment is often treated as an administrative burden that needs to be completed quickly. Yet it is one of the earliest and most powerful opportunities an organisation has to demonstrate how it values people. When a candidate’s first experience is entirely automated, impersonal and rushed, they receive a message about the culture before they have met anyone.
AI can support the recruitment process, and it can improve efficiency, organise information and remove repetitive work, but human judgement in recruitment remains essential. This matters particularly for small and medium businesses. A large organisation can absorb a poor hiring decision more easily, but a smaller business cannot. One person can affect performance, team morale, customers and the owner’s time.
The answer is not to fear AI or pretend it can be excluded from recruitment. The answer is to build a process that is stronger than presentation. Use multiple candidate assessment methods and look for a convergence of evidence and investigate inconsistencies. Engage candidates early and treat them like people rather than applications.
The focus of Fermion is
"Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and
“Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please
contact us at Fermion.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Eleanor Roosevelt.
NB: I use ChatGPT as a writing and editing tool, but the ideas, opinion and final views in this article are my own.
