AI × Hiring

The authors interviewed 30 recruiting and engineering leaders in New York and San Francisco in August and September 2026 about how AI is changing hiring, covering inbound, sourcing, referrals, evaluation and winning candidates. They report that fraud can make up 25% to 80% of applications for remote roles, that no team trusts AI to rank applicants, and that agentic sourcing output degrades after the first two to three days unless someone keeps steering it. The report also describes new evaluation formats such as system design, building with AI and reviewing AI-written code, and argues that effective filters should be harder for low-quality candidates to fake than for strong ones to emit.