Generative AI killed the resume star

Resumes have never been great at predicting job success. At best, they’ve been a tool for hiring managers to make hopeful assumptions about someone’s potential. At worst? They perpetuate bias and miss top talent entirely.

Now, add two cold, hard facts:

• Over 70% of workers admit to lying on their resumes.
• More than half of all resumes are now AI-generated.

They add up to one thing: generative AI has killed the resume star.

The good news? Pre-hire skill assessments are a smarter, fairer, and proven method to predict success. IO psychologists have been shouting this from the rooftops for decades. It’s beyond time we all started listening.

What is a skill assessment?

Why rely on a self-written marketing document when you can measure a candidate’s abilities?

Validated skills are up to 5x more predictive of success than guesswork based on past job titles. This is the shift: from what you say you can do to what you can actually show.

How skills are validated pre-hire:

• Real-world simulations: Test candidates through realistic tasks they’d perform on the job.
• Coding assessments: Gauge real technical proficiency, early and accurately.
• Game-based assessments: Use cognitive and behavioral games to surface the traits most predictive of on-the-job success.

When you hire for skills, you hire for success

At Hirevue, we go beyond skills scraping. We look at the whole person through our Skills Plus framework. The framework includes competencies, skills, and key factors like motivational drivers and interests. 

Competencies

Competencies are comprehensive bundles of job-relevant behaviors. They combine skills, knowledge, abilities, interests, and motivation into a unified, interpretable concept. Competencies are the language of business performance, aligning potential with role expectations.

Hirevue has defined 19 core competencies that underpin success across various jobs. Each competency can be further decomposed into specific, measurable, observable, and actionable subfactors.

Skills

Skills are specific proficiencies developed through training or experience. In Hirevue’s taxonomy, skills fall into two categories:

• Hard skills (e.g., coding, accounting)
• Soft skills (e.g., communication, critical thinking)

Skills+

Performance isn’t just skills—it’s also:

• Motivational drivers (e.g., achievement orientation)
• Interests (e.g., helping others)
• Traits (e.g., resilience)
• Cultural alignment (e.g., team fit)

These human factors are often overlooked, but they transform a “qualified” hire into an extraordinary one.

Real-world examples

Call center agents

Take call center agents. Traditional hiring looks for resume buzzwords: “multitasking,” “communication,” “customer service.” But countless optimization studies from our customers using assessments reveal that some skills matter more than others. A LOT more: Multitasking is 4x more critical to success than other related skills, and customer service orientation is 3x more vital.

A traditional, resume-based approach would have you believe that a much larger cluster of skills matter for performance, and that each one carries equal importance.

In-cabin roles for airlines

Hiring based on skills-first insights isn’t just smarter—it’s transformative. Here’s another great example from a major US airline using Hirevue assessments for their in-cabin roles:

• Flight attendants in the top skill assessment tier sign up 3x more customers for credit cards annually than those in the lower tier, netting over $2M in value in just one year.
• Retention rates skyrocketed when the company prioritized measured skills over resume spin.
• Diversity surged, with Hispanic representation up 43%, Black representation up 21.6%, and Asian representation up 22.4%.

These are just two examples from thousands of studies that continuously prove the quantifiable success of hiring for skills over resumes. 

AI isn’t the problem. Bias and guesswork are.

Critics fear that AI will dehumanize hiring. Ironically, it’s doing the opposite. By focusing on validated skills over subjective assumptions, AI helps standardize evaluations and reduce bias.

Here’s how Hirevue ensures fairness at every step:

• Every assessment is built on a rigorous job analysis by IO psychologists.
• Training data is carefully curated to maximize diversity and minimize bias.
• Models are tested for adverse impact pre- and post-deployment.
• We undergo regular third-party audits of both our algorithms and our underlying science.

Technology isn’t replacing humans—it’s replacing human guesswork.

In today’s hiring landscape, speed, scale, and fairness aren’t negotiable—they’re survival strategies. Hirevue’s whole person approach leads the way by moving beyond resumes, beyond spin, and assumptions. We measure what matters: potential, ability, and fit.

Skills-based hiring isn’t just a better way to hire. It’s a better way to see people.