AI is breaking the hiring funnel at both ends at once

Harvard Business Review argues the early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends at once. At the top, resumes and cover letters have lost their signal because anyone can have AI optimise them. At the bottom, live video interviews are easily gamed by real-time assistance feeding candidates answers as they speak.

The sharp point is what that selects for. When the earliest filters stop working, the authors write, an organisation begins to systematically pick the candidates best at performing the hiring process rather than those best equipped to do the job. Both ends fail in the same direction, so the distortion compounds rather than cancelling out.

The usual fixes, more screening rounds or AI detectors, mostly add friction to a signal that has already collapsed. The harder question HBR leaves open is whether the interview survives at all, or whether hiring shifts toward paid trials and work samples that are expensive to fake.