The Atlantic, June 2026
A few years ago, Ken Schumacher was working for a technology company. Part of his job involved assessing potential hires: hopping on a Zoom call, giving an applicant an engineering test (kind of like a crossword puzzle with code instead of words), and going on “mute for an hour” as the applicant struggled through it.
Except many of the candidates weren’t struggling. The firm’s exercises were getting posted on sites such as Glassdoor. “All these savvy 23-year-olds would, of course, practice the problem three times, come to me, and crush it,” Schumacher told me. “Now the bigger problem is everyone’s using AI to write their resume.” They’re also using AI-powered chatbots and teleprompters to help them get to the next round. It’s become “really, really hard for anyone to figure out who’s real and who’s fake,” Schumacher said. (This turned out to be its own market opportunity—he now runs a start-up using AI to detect AI cheating by job candidates.)
