TL;DR

Short answer: Hire for demonstrated skills, because AI has made every resume look like a 100% match. My guest on this episode, CoderPad CEO Amanda Richardson, and I agree that the fix is a short, hands-on work sample that shows what a candidate can build, judge, and stand behind.

Key stats you need to know:

  • 71% of leaders would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them, and 66% would not hire someone without AI skills (Microsoft Work Trend Index).
  • By 2030, 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million displaced, a net gain of 78 million (World Economic Forum).
  • CoderPad opened one developer role and received 500 applicants in 24 hours, many of them tailored by bots to match the posting perfectly.

The leadership takeaway: Over the next 12 to 24 months, talent leaders who pilot skills assessments on a handful of roles will build the internal proof that hiring managers need. Leaders who wait will keep sorting identical resumes.

0:00
/0:41

📺 Watch the full conversation: Amanda Richardson on The Human Capitalist (YouTube)

📻 Listen on Spotify: The Human Capitalist Podcast

What Should You Hire For When Every Resume Looks Like a Perfect Match?

Hire for skills that candidates can demonstrate on the spot, because the resume no longer separates anyone from anyone. I opened this episode with a blunt line: I broke the resume. Candidates now use AI to tailor their documents to a job posting in seconds, and applicant tracking systems respond by showing a wall of 100% matches.

Amanda lived this the week before we recorded. CoderPad posted a developer role and drew 500 applicants in a single day. Her read was funny and fair: the company is not that famous, so the bots were clearly doing the applying. When every candidate matches, the screening question becomes who knows what they claim to know.

I told Amanda that the blame is shared. Part of it sits with job descriptions, which should work as scorecards and read nothing like job advertisements. Part of it sits with the technology. The largest part is candidate quality, and that is where assessments earn their place. Amanda's company mission says it plainly: help people get hired based on skills, not resumes.

The habit we are fighting is lazy proxy hiring. Hire from Google because Google has good developers. Require a computer science degree, even though Amanda cited a recent figure that 46% of professional software developers do not hold one. Her sharpest point was about equity.

A degree often reflects a family that could pay for it, and leaning on that paper means betting the largest investment a company makes on somebody else's credential.

Why Do Companies Say Skills-Based Hiring but Keep Hiring on Experience?

Companies keep hiring on experience because hiring managers trust familiar signals, and talent leaders have not given them better evidence. Amanda and I traded stories that ended the same way every time.

Mine involved a technology company where I introduced an AI interviewer to replace inconsistent human technical interviews. A hiring manager wanted a senior developer with eight years at a large company. One candidate had no college degree, had taught himself through GitHub, YouTube, freelance work, and pro bono projects, and was in his twenties. His assessment scores beat the veteran's by a wide margin. I asked the hiring manager what we were charging the client for, and the answer was outcomes. The manager still hired the eight year veteran. We let that person go six months later and hired the younger developer.

Amanda has the customer version. A crypto company assessed every outbound sourced candidate but skipped assessments for employee referrals, because a colleague had already vouched for them. Over 18 months, early churn ran much higher in the referral funnel, since nobody had verified the skills. During the 2021 hiring frenzy, another customer wanted to switch assessments off to move faster. The logic sounded sensible and the results did not follow.

The pattern holds beyond engineering. Eight years of experience, as I put it to Amanda, can mean eight years of attending all hands meetings. Experience does not equal skill. Skill drives outcomes, and outcomes are what organizations pay for. For more on why HR processes lag the workforce they serve, I wrote about whether HR was built for the wrong workforce.

What Does a 45 Minute Hands-On Assessment Look Like?

A strong assessment puts a real task in front of the candidate, inside the tools they would use on the job, with a 45 minute clock. Amanda described what this looks like for a developer: give the candidate roughly 3,000 lines of code and an environment, then ask them to build a feature using whatever AI coding tool they prefer. It does not need to be perfect. A person who knows what they are doing gets close, and a person who does not is obvious.

The same design works outside engineering. For a marketer, hand over a data set and prior work, then ask for the analysis, a campaign, a landing page, and a promotional email, all built in Claude or ChatGPT. A candidate with real marketing skill and AI fluency will move quickly. Compare that with the alternatives most of us have used for years, such as "tell me about a time you built a campaign" (answers drift with memory) or brainteasers about golf balls in a Boeing airplane (answers tell us nothing about marketing).

Amanda also gave a scoring rule worth stealing. Do not agonize over a 78 versus an 80. Focus on candidates above 80 and below 20, because the middle is a desert and rarely holds the real decision.

This work is spreading beyond developers. Meta uses CoderPad for product manager interviews because it wants builders. One company hiring a patent attorney wants proof the candidate will not file an application full of hallucinated citations. Financial analyst roles now need evidence of smart AI use. The role boundaries between product, engineering, design, marketing, and customer success are blurring, and the assessment is how a company confirms the person can do the job in front of them.

Hiring managers will resist. Amanda's advice, and mine, is to run experiments on a few critical roles, collect the results, and let the data build momentum. She also pointed to a signal from candidates: Gen Z applicants, locked out of networking advantages, are asking to take assessments so they can prove their skills.

Which Three Skills Matter Most in the AI Era?

Curiosity, decision making with incomplete information, and systems thinking are the three skills Amanda would hire for if she were building a company from scratch. I asked her that question without warning, and her answers came quickly.

Curiosity came first, because she loves questions and wondering. Second was the ability to decide without sufficient information, which she described as conviction under uncertainty. I connected it to my own Strengths Finder result of Strategic, a word I dislike for sounding like consulting jargon. The skill itself is the ability to see the pattern fast, commit at roughly 80% confidence, and move. Life rarely offers perfect answers.

Third was systems thinking, a skill Amanda said she would not have listed five years ago. She described a conversation with her head of marketing about product marketing. Is the job to produce one pagers and ebooks, or to orchestrate a set of tools that deliver customized information to every sales and customer success rep instantly? A systems thinker sees the second job. The same logic separates people who deliver the code from people who solve the problem. Two earlier guests defined AI native in similar terms, as systems thinking plus the judgment to know what a human must still drive.

A fourth skill ran through the whole conversation: editing your own work. Amanda shared a rule she liked from a company's AI manifesto, which says that whatever you deliver, no matter who or what produced it, is yours. AI makes good people faster and exposes sloppy people faster. Reading what you send before you send it has always mattered, and the tools have made the penalty for skipping it much higher.

What Does the Leadership Reckoning Look Like?

The reckoning lands first on middle management and on HR leaders who wait. Amanda sees VP and middle manager roles under pressure in San Francisco, especially roles built on synthesizing one on ones into slides for the next level up. She pointed to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who is reported to have around 60 direct reports and skips one on ones, bringing the right people into a single room to decide. Neither of us wants 60 direct reports, but the question is fair: what value does each management layer create?

I raised the next priority for any practitioner: preparing leaders to manage hybrid teams of humans and machines. Many leaders struggle to manage humans well, and now they are adding agents. When I asked HR leaders who agreed with that point what they were doing about it, I mostly heard silence. A spark was heading toward a gas soaked roof, and the plan was to confirm it later.

Amanda's counter to the do nothing strategy is direct. Every CEO is announcing an AI first company, and every talent leader is answering with "now what?" Her answer: assess for the skills you need and let AI be the catalyst for fixing how you hire. This is as much a people transformation as a technology transformation. Companies win or lose on whether their people and structures can adopt the tools. I take this on in The FutHRist five mindsets, and my value of work matrix is where I start any org design conversation.

The numbers add urgency. The World Economic Forum projects 92 million displaced jobs and 170 million new ones by 2030 (World Economic Forum). The people in the first group will not automatically qualify for the second, which makes skills visibility a workforce planning issue. A financial analyst should be asking which adjacent role to move into, and what an agent orchestrator for finance involves.

What This Means for You as a Leader

The resume was always a weak proxy, and AI has removed any doubt. Credentials, employer logos, and years of tenure tell a hiring manager very little about whether a person can produce the outcome. Amanda's optimism and mine meet here: AI creates a new skill set that nobody holds a degree in, which gives candidates a level field to prove themselves.

Leaders who move will pick two or three critical roles, build a 45 minute work sample for each, and show hiring managers the score gap between credentials and performance. Leaders who hold on to the old signals will keep paying for experience that does not show up in the work. I would rather be in the first group, and Amanda would too.

Amanda Richardson is CEO of CoderPad. You can find her on LinkedIn as Amanda Hart Richardson, or learn more at CoderPad. If this conversation raised questions about how your hiring process holds up, I explored a related tension in whether HR is becoming irrelevant and in why AI readiness gaps are widening.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify. And remember to invest in yourself, because no one is going to do it quite like you do.

Resources for HR Leaders

If you found this useful, here's what I've built for HR executives dealing with the same challenges.

FAQ

What does it mean that AI broke the resume?

AI tools let candidates tailor a resume to any job posting in seconds, so applicant tracking systems now show many 100% matches. CoderPad received 500 applicants for one developer role in 24 hours. The resume no longer separates strong candidates from weak ones.

What is skills-based hiring?

Skills-based hiring evaluates candidates on what they can demonstrate instead of degrees, employer names, or years of experience. A hands-on assessment of 45 minutes, built around a real task, is one of the clearest ways to apply it.

Why do hiring managers still choose experience over skills?

Experience is a familiar proxy, and managers trust what they know. The fix is evidence. Run a pilot on a few roles, compare assessment scores with outcomes, and share the results with hiring managers.

Does AI replace junior developers?

Amanda said the opposite is happening. Three years ago she heard that junior developers would not be needed. Today AI native junior talent is rising, bringing new habits and ways of working into organizations.

What skills should leaders hire for in the AI era?

Amanda named curiosity, decision making with insufficient information, and systems thinking. Self editing and standing behind everything you deliver, no matter which tool helped produce it, belong on that list as well.

What should CHROs do first?

Pick two or three critical roles and replace the resume screen with a short work sample that mirrors the job. Then prepare leaders to manage teams that include both people and AI agents.