The recruitment process has become so frustrating lately that more than 1.2 million recruiters and candidates alike take to Reddit each week to peruse a subreddit appropriately called r/recruitinghell.
What’s largely to blame? AI.
Among U.S. hiring managers, 60% say that AI is making it harder to evaluate a candidate’s real skills, according to a report released this week from Western Governors University. Even more alarming is that nearly 20% of the 3,100-plus professionals surveyed cited difficulty confirming whether they are interviewing a human candidate rather than AI, according to the online university’s Workforce Decoded report.
“AI is changing more than work; it is changing how employers identify and evaluate talent,” Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University, said in a statement.
Applicants, too, are increasingly frustrated by how companies use AI. Indeed, 44% of candidates view employers’ increased use of AI negatively, citing concerns that qualified applicants may be unfairly screened out, that AI can make mistakes or that the technology can reduce human interaction, according to an annual report on the state of online recruiting released last week by iHire, an employment platform.
DO DEGREES STILL MATTER?
Many employers are now playing catch-up to find new methods to verify the skills of potential hires, which is especially challenging for entry-level candidates. Among employers who say AI has made it more difficult to evaluate candidate skills, 54% say they’ve cut entry-level hiring, according to the report from Western Governors University.
“When employers cannot trust the signals in front of them, opportunity narrows—especially for people trying to get their first foothold in the workforce,” Pulsipher said.
But employers are increasingly relying on a variety of signals to assess a candidate’s readiness to join the workforce—including degrees, skills and experience from internships, apprenticeships or other project-based work.
AI has already transformed the career trajectories of college graduates with certain degrees, leading to debate about whether this technology is killing the value of a degree in general. But a higher share of employers surveyed this year said they consider college degrees or certificates to be more valuable than did in 2025—and Pulsipher says that that creates an opportunity.
“Higher education and employers have to build a better proof system: credentials that carry meaning, assessments that verify what a person can do, and real-world experiences that show how they think, adapt and use AI responsibly,” he said.