The Hiring Process is Now an AI Arms Race, but There’s Still Room to Restore the Human Element

The average hiring manager today isn’t reading applications so much as grading AI against AI.

Candidates paste a job description into ChatGPT and generate a perfectly tailored resume and cover letter. Employers run that same text through applicant tracking systems and use generative AI to score, rank and reject candidates at scale. On top of that, candidates are also using products that will automatically apply them for jobs. This means every company is getting more resumes for every role and those resumes are lower-signal than they’ve ever been. In short, it has never been easier to apply for jobs and it has never been harder to find the right candidate.

AI has gone fully mainstream in this dance. Huntr’s Job Search Trends Report for second-quarter 2025 finds over 90% of job seekers now use tools like ChatGPT for applications. Meanwhile, Resume Now’s AI & Hiring Trends 2025 reports 91% of U.S. employers deploy AI somewhere in their hiring workflow, and that about 99% of Fortune 500 companies rely on applicant tracking system platforms that reject a reported ~75% of resumes before any human sees them. The result is an arms race in text.

Both sides are optimizing for keyword matching, with candidates jamming AI-generated bullet points into their resumes and employers using AI to review and score them. The result is the process becoming less about talent and more about prompt engineering. Employers are already feeling the downside. They’re seeing more volume, less differentiation and skyrocketing cases of fraud and misrepresented candidate experience. This is where video, and especially short form, skills-based video, is emerging.

Gen Z already lives in a video-native world. One recent survey found that roughly 40% of Gen Z respondents have secured a job or internship through TikTok, with similarly high numbers on Instagram and other social platforms. For them, talking to a front-facing camera is normal and certainly more natural than writing a formal cover letter.

From an employer’s perspective, they can garner a different kind of insight. A 90-second video responding to a prompt of “Tell us about the most important project you’ve owned” or “Walk us through how you’d handle an upset customer” reveals communication skills, authenticity and judgment in ways AI-generated text simply can’t. Of course, AI can help candidates prepare, but it can’t fully inhabit their presence, eye contact, dynamism and on-the-fly thinking.

At Starting Line, we invest tens of millions of dollars annually into early stage technology companies, giving us a front-row seat to how hiring is evolving inside leading teams. Based on what we’re seeing across our portfolio, the recruiting stack emerging today looks like this:

1. AI for volume and hiring logistics: Use AI to manage inbound, filter out spam, schedule interviews and keep candidates informed.

2. Video and skills for signal: Introduce structured, short-form video responses or skills-based assessments early in the funnel to see the human behind the resume.

3. Humans for judgment: Bring managers in sooner to review top video responses, not just keyword scores, and to make final decisions.

Just like all technology, when utilized thoughtfully, video doesn’t replace humans. It replaces the worst part of today’s process: walls of nearly identical AI-polished text. In a world where everyone is already using AI, the employers who win talent will be the ones who stop asking, “How good is your prompt engineering?” and start asking, “How good are you when the script runs out?”

And for young talent, that might finally make the job search feel like something other than talking to a machine.