AI flooded the job market. Employers are ditching the resume

U.K. graduate employers received an average of 140 applications per vacancy in 2025 — the highest level recorded in three decades, according to data from the Institute of Student Employers. That surge, driven in part by candidates using AI to generate endless tailored resumes and cover letters, is pushing employers toward a fundamentally different way of evaluating who gets hired.

The resume is "broken," according to Barb Hyman, founder and CEO of recruitment platform Sapia.ai. "How many people are you missing out on because you're relying on an artefact?" she said, noting that AI can now tailor a resume — or CV, as it's known in the U.K. — to any role.

The stakes are considerable. If AI has made it trivial to produce polished applications at scale, then the document that has anchored hiring for decades no longer signals much at all — and both employers and job seekers need a replacement.

Skills over employment history

Skills, rather than employment history, will increasingly determine who gets hired, according to Hyman. A hairdresser might not look like an obvious fit for a contact center job on paper, she told CNBC — but could excel in the role, because hairdressers tend to have high levels of empathy, listen to people all day and spend hours solving complex problems.

Assessing skills directly can reveal strengths and weaknesses that a traditional resume hides, Hyman said — sometimes painting a picture even the candidates themselves weren't sure of.

Hyman isn't alone in seeing hiring move in this direction. Around two-thirds of U.K. organizations have adopted skills-based hiring, according to 2026 research from Michael Page, a recruitment firm headquartered in Surrey, England. Almost 60% of candidates said they were more likely to apply for roles defined by skills rather than traditional qualifications or career history.

The shift is also forcing employers to think carefully about which skills they actually value.

Judgment becomes the scarce skill

James Broadhead, the Dublin-based CTO of AI decision-making company Taktile, told CNBC that a prototype that might once have taken an engineer three weeks to build can now be one of 10 generated in a single afternoon, thanks to AI.

"The hard part has become having the judgement to decide which of those are any good," Broadhead said.

Taktile now looks for interpersonal skills — such as how well candidates can speak to customers — as well as self-reflection and a willingness to question what they have built, he added. The company is also interested in whether candidates continually experiment with AI.

"The pace of model releases is so fast that the ceiling of what you can do changes every three months," Broadhead said. "And so the question we're asking is: what have you changed about your AI tools in the last three weeks?"

That framing marks a shift in what technical hiring screens for: not accumulated knowledge, which AI increasingly supplies on demand, but the pace at which a candidate updates their own practice.

Throwing candidates in at the deep end

Other companies are assessing potential hires through direct, practical challenges. At digital marketing and advertising agency PMG, graduate candidates complete practical exercises in person, work in teams and tackle client briefs. Josh Krichefski, PMG's London-based EMEA president, said this is designed to assess how candidates actually interact and approach work.

"You don't really know whether someone's going to have the skills to do something until you challenge them to do it," Krichefski told CNBC. "The past doesn't tell you that."

Younger candidates are often well placed for this, he said, because Gen Z has fewer preconceived notions about what a job looks like.

"It's another reason for why we believe in investing in young people, particularly when we're at a time where the world's changing so bloody fast," Krichefski said. "Graduates don't arrive with fixed assumptions about how work has traditionally been done."

The implication cuts against a common assumption in AI-era labor debates: rather than squeezing out entry-level workers, the collapse of resume-based signals may advantage candidates with no track record at all.

AI as a check on human bias

Perhaps paradoxically, AI — despite exacerbating the problems of traditional hiring — can also help solve them. The technology can be used to surface candidates from different backgrounds.

Sapia.ai's Hyman argues that resumes and conventional interviews have always been vulnerable to human bias, including "mirror hiring," where hiring managers consciously or unconsciously favor people with backgrounds similar to their own.

"We see things through the prism of our own experience," she said. "Really what's broken is human bias, but we're all in denial about it."

For Hyman, that doesn't mean removing humans from hiring altogether. The final decision should rest with the people who will work alongside the new hire, while technology is better suited to screening candidates at scale. Assessment, she said, should always run both ways.

"Hiring the wrong person is extremely painful for the hiring manager and they're best placed to know whether you're the right person for them and their team," she said. "And the job seeker deserves to get as much opportunity to stress test you, as you do of them."

With two-thirds of U.K. organizations already moving to skills-based hiring and model capabilities resetting every few months, the resume's replacement looks less like a new document and more like a live, two-way test — one that both employers and candidates will have to keep retaking.