I spoke to 15 senior hiring managers working in tech and asked them how AI has changed the way they hire developers. These are not recruiters, but engineering managers, CTOs and technical leads who are directly responsible for hiring the people in their team.

Job Applications

The number of applications per job has shot up and the quality of applications has degraded. The level of crap that has come in in last 6 months is insane.

This quote from one of the hiring managers sums up the current situation in Australia. Hiring managers are fed up with AI generated CVs. They see so many of them, they are turning to their professional networks for help.

Referrals are a big deal. If I can't trust what's written on a CV, I'll turn to people I can trust, for recommendations.

You don't need a machine to write your CV. Your CV is the story of your professional life and you know that better than anybody or anything.

Employers are using AI to screen job applications. A machine is deciding if you will go on a shortlist, or if you get deleted before a human knows you exist. If you use AI to help write your CV, you are now in an AI arms race with the employer's system.

As one CTO said

AI is scrutinising AI. Where is the humanity in that?

You don't need to be part of this AI arms race. You can't control what an organisation does with your CV, but you can control what you do with it. If the humanity is getting stripped out of the process, it's because you gave yours away.

Ultimately your CV is going to find its way to a real person to read and that person wants to read a CV written by a human.

You may believe that AI is better at writing than you, but you surely can't believe that AI is better at writing about you? How can it accurately capture who you are, better than you can?

Maybe you're worried you will miss some of the necessary keywords or job requirements. Wouldn't it be safer to get Claude to stuff all that in for you? Considering you are a developer who is used to writing code from specifications, it shouldn't be a stretch to read the job spec and make sure you have it covered. Not only have it covered, but you've been able to relate all requirements to past job experience.

"But writing a CV is so boring. I can't come up with anything interesting to say. It reads a lot better when Gemini rewords it for me."

If you can't find anything interesting to say about your career, you are going to really struggle if you make it to an interview. Imagine a hiring manager asking you about the fascinating details of your last job on moonbase alpha (thanks Gemini), only to hear the deafening thud of your heart as you wonder what other hallucinations you missed.

"But I'm busy, I don't have time to write a different CV for each job I'm applying for. I work crazy hours, I have a family, I need my 2 hours of Netflix to unwind and if I don't get an interview, I'm just wasting my time."

Yes. We have busy lives. Yes it can take hours to tailor your CV to a job description and yes, you may do all this work and get no response. If you spend 15-30 mins using AI to reword your CV and then think "job done. Netflix time". Your application may get past AI screening, but when it reaches the hiring manager, another small part of them dies at seeing another ChatGPT CV.

Important things take time and sometimes they take a really long time. The care that you put into the process is going to show. If you spend 15 mins on a chatbot, that is going to show. If you spend 4 hours crafting it by hand, that is going to show.

I interviewed for a Head of Engineering job at Amazon years ago. It was 9 separate interviews. One of the interviews was on system design with the Head of Architecture for Asia. I was really worried about it. I spent over 50 hours preparing for those interviews whilst holding down a fulltime job. At the end of the process I didn't get the job, but the feedback on my system design interview was that I had done really well. I don't regret the time I spent preparing. You don't have regrets when you do everything you can. Even if it doesn't work out.

What do organisations need?

Organisations need to adapt to AI or they fear falling behind or going extinct. Regardless of whether executives are blinded by the hype or are responding to market, shareholder or investor expectations, they have to get on board the AI train. To say "no" is to bet against the potential of AI and it's a brave or foolish position to take in 2026.

Employers need a workforce who is on board the same AI train. They need developers who can help the company adapt and thrive with AI and the hiring managers' needs reflect this.

Getting through the Interview

Openness to AI is a must

When I asked the hiring managers "Would you hire a developer who refused to use AI tools?", they all said "no". Regardless of how senior the developer was or how well they had done in the interview, nobody would hire a developer who was so close minded.

Three Engineering Managers responded:

If the reason they are saying no is because they believe AI produces slop, they don't know what they're saying. That's as insightful as saying that writing software produces bugs. It shows a very low level of understanding and implementation experience

All candidates should be open to using AI. I would hire senior devs who didn't have experience of using AI in coding. I wouldn't hire any dev who is against it and refuses.

No way. They need to be open minded. I wouldn't hire anyone these days who wasn't open to it

One CTO told me

No. If the company's decision is to use AI, then that's just a requirement of the job. It's like saying the company IT policy is windows machines, but you want to use a Mac and you refuse. You should be conscious of these organisational decisions. If companies have designed systems to have AI in them, you expect your engineers to have the skills, capabilities and willingness to maintain and expand these systems

I have no idea why a developer would answer no to that question in an interview, but I'm told they have. If you are that developer, why would you refuse to be part of the biggest technological advancement in our lifetime? Are you not curious? Or are you so utterly confident in your abilities, that you believe you can outperform AI? If it's the latter, you are going to become unhireable.

Do you need experience using AI?

The hiring managers were split on this question and it depended upon how deep AI adoption was in the organisation. If the organisation was "all in" on AI, then you needed experience. If the company planned to go all in, but were currently very light on adoption, you needed experience to help them get there.

Personally, I don't know why you would go to interviews as a developer without having AI experience. Even if the job description doesn't mention AI, you have to assume it's going to come up in the interview. You must know you will be up against other candidates who have used AI. With everything else being equal, in the current climate, AI experience will win out.

If your current job doesn't use it, it's no excuse. You should be curious enough to find your own time to explore it.

What else are hiring managers looking for?

The universal consensus was for more product centric and end-to-end system thinkers. They wanted team players. Nobody would sacrifice good team dynamics for an individual. As one said

Will they be difficult to work with? They have to be a good team fit. The team is way more important than the individual. We don't want to work with dickheads.

It's pretty easy to spot the dickhead in a tech team situation. They are the ones who think everyone else is an idiot. Don't be that person.

Communication skills have always been important but their relevance is higher than ever. Engineers need to be good communicators, with an ability to explain concepts in plain english to non-technical people.

These three quotes sum up what everyone was looking for:

You have to communicate well. You can teach people technical skills but you cannot easily change character traits. I would rather hire someone less technical who is a better communicator. I want someone who talks, contributes, and comes up with ideas. They talk but they don't brag. When they talk it means something. It's not just to hear the sound of their own voice.

and

Pre AI, engineers wrote a lot of code, now you can come up the stack a bit and think about the product a lot more. When we evaluate candidates we look for humble, hungry, smart people. You use your gut if they have these qualities. We are asking questions to see if they can think at a product level, rather than an SQL query level. I want to hear they are thinking about how the business problem is to be solved. They need to be able to communicate clearly about the solution to solve the problem rather than give a complicated and sophisticated technical solution. They need to be able to communicate to other people in plain english

and

They need to be articulate and able to explain things in plain language to a non-technical person. This will really make you stand out. Someone who can prioritise with stakeholders. How do you balance maintenance and features?

What a crazy set of ideas eh? Clear communication…plain English. What is happening to this industry?

Video Interviews

Apparently some of you are vaping in job interviews…

The hiring managers told me

All of our roles are remote and interviewing over video can often be a poor experience. People don't seem to recognise they need to think about how they come across on video. It seems as though no-one thinks about it. Some of them look like they just got up.

Learning how to present yourself over video is paramount, how your camera is set up, looking at the camera, what is in your background? I've had people vaping whilst being interviewed. It's not a good look

I don't want to see a virtual background. I want to see exactly where this person is going to be working. What kind of environment is it? Are they sitting in the kitchen next to a pile of dirty dishes? What does that say about them?

Yes, you are being judged by the state of the environment you will be working in.

And if you think walking around the streets or sitting in a cafe is a good idea - it isn't. It's a terrible experience for the interviewer and signals to them either "I'm homeless. Let me show you around my office" or "this is how much I care about your job".

Coding Tests

Hiring managers expected candidates would use AI coding assistants during coding tests and some actively encouraged it. There was a strong signal here that developers should be familiar with AI tools.

One Engineering Manager said

We ask them to do a home test using AI. If they get to the second interview, we have them extend the solution and it's obvious if they know how to use AI properly. The ones that fail are the ones that say "ok - I will get AI to do it", but they do it without any guidance and they seem completely lost and say "why did it do that?". I love to see them implementing it and it goes wrong. The good ones troubleshoot it. They have a mental model of how the system should work. Average candidates will go fuck! and try this and try that without any clear idea of what they are doing

And another

Seeing how the person approaches the problem is key and how they use AI tools to support them doing it. If you are expecting a person to use AI in their development, you would want to know how they would and wouldn't use it.

And

It's a red flag if they have delegated to the AI and they have no ownership of the solution. They don't understand what the AI has come up with as they have just given it a prompt

Conclusions

You need to recognise where to use AI and where not to. Using it to write your CV erases you. Using it to write code, extends you.

If you're using AI to write code, you have to know how to guide it.

To understand how to guide it, you have to pull your head out of the weeds and understand the product and the architecture. You have to know good engineering principles.

Because you are prompting in plain english, you have to be able to clearly articulate yourself in a non-technical way.

It's all very logical isn't it?