Are you actively looking for your next leadership role? Before you speak to another executive recruiter, apply for another leadership role or walk into another interview, get clear on two things.

First, what is your ideal next role? Second, what is your value proposition?

Smart answers to both of these questions will save you months of wasted effort. Get them wrong – and watch one role after another slip by.

1. How To Switch Industries Without Taking A Step Back In Your Career.

The key to a successful industry change? Lead with transferable themes in your background.

But not all moves are possible. Arielle Executive’s Managing Consultant, Philippa Counsell, explains what’s realistic for you, and how to pull it off.

2. The Most Fatal Job Search Mistake Accomplished Leaders Make.

The more accomplished you are, the more career directions you have in front of you.

You’ll be tempted to appear flexible (e.g., “I can do transformation, growth, operations, or turnaround work”) – but that’s one of the most common and expensive mistakes we see.

Philippa explains how executives with complex careers accidentally shoot themselves in the foot by targeting too many directions – and what to do instead.

What is the best way to position yourself when your background is broad or unusually complex?

3. How To Make Executive Recruiters And Employers Notice You.

Your future employer isn’t buying your past activities – they’re buying a promise of future outcomes. Here’s how to sell your background correctly.

Philippa explains what a strong value proposition looks like – and how you can build one.

How Arielle Executive Helps Leaders Get More Interviews And Job Offers.

No senior leader builds a successful career alone.

Arielle Executive helps Australia’s executives remove the roadblocks that make job search harder than it needs to be.

Which of these roadblocks would you like to remove first?

I am applying for executive roles, but not getting traction.

I have a complex career that I don’t know how to sell.

I have an underperforming resume.

I have an uninspiring LinkedIn Profile.

I was recently interviewed by an Australian media publication about the ways AI will reshape our workforce.

I’m reposting the conversation below.

If you’re worried about your career – and want strategies for protecting it – this Q&A will help you think about the future more clearly.

What is the value of work in the age of AI?

A lot of human workplace value used to live in production.

You got praise for sending memos, managing busywork, producing spreadsheets and making PowerPoint presentations.

Even if production wasn’t directly your job (e.g., designer), it likely contained a significant amount of production work (e.g., sales teams preparing for client meetings and creating tenders).

(Related: How To Get More Job Interviews And Job Offers).

AI made production cheap and abundant. Anyone can now produce a slick deck or a clean prototype in minutes. So human value relocates to three things:

To preserve your career, you need to be strong in at least two of these domains. If you want to be a rare asset, you need to be a master of all three.

What does the future of jobs look like in an AI-driven economy?

For entry-level workers, work will shift from doing tasks to managing AI agents. 

There will be fewer mid-level managers, and the survivors will do less busywork and more architecting of hybrid agentic/human teams.

Executives will – for the first time in history – be capital allocators of companies with near-infinite production capacity. Their job will shift from asking “can we build it?” to “what is actually worth building?”

Once the decision is made, their role will be to lead rapid, iterative experiments that validate or refute it.

How will people earn a living as certain roles and salary structures evolve or disappear?

Let me give you the bad news. A lot of people will lose their jobs – despite what Sam Altmans of the world are telling us.

Software developers and content writers are feeling it already, with most now spending their days managing agents instead of writing code or polishing prose.

The good news is that it won’t be an “everyone is out of work” scenario. It will be a flip in what we view as scarce.

For a century, production talent was expensive and scarce. Soon, talent will be available on demand for a price approximating the cost of electricity.

That’s where the money will be – you’ll earn a living by climbing out of the doing and into the judging.

What are your broader thoughts on the future of work?

My view is that the standard career pathways will reorder.

For decades, people followed a similar preordained path: school, tertiary education, then the corporate world. A few weirdos like me decided to rebel and become entrepreneurs.

I think it will shift to: school, tertiary/entrepreneurship hybrid stint.

People with an aptitude for entrepreneurship will continue on that track. People who don’t will get corporate jobs.

Here’s my logic. If the most valuable skill ahead is judgement, you won’t be able to obtain it from theory. You’ll need first-hand experience.

So you will fund your own apprenticeship by building something – while you’re at uni. And unis, fighting their own fight for survival and relevance, will have no choice but to teach this skillset.

And I’m not talking about more Bachelor of Business (Entrepreneurship) programs taught by stuffy professors who read every book by Cialdini but have never set foot outside academia.

For the next generation of students, that will be freeing: their degree won’t be an empty credential to wave around, but evidence of their ability to build.

Steven

“The market is impossible.” “Recruiters never respond.” “Employers are too lazy to understand my value.” “The whole system is broken.”

I see and hear this rhetoric all the time. Especially as I’m doom-scrolling LinkedIn on a Sunday afternoon – because it feels more productive than binge-watching Netflix.

(But is it, really?).

The market is tight. Executive hiring is slow. Recruiters are often overloaded, unresponsive and guilty of trying to fit square pegs into square holes.

(Related: How Smart Executives Prepare For Job Search In 2026).

Great People Are Absolutely Being Missed.

But there is a point where blaming the “system” becomes too convenient.

If you’re active in the market and aren’t getting the results you were expecting, ask yourself a harder question – have you done everything you can to beat the market?

This question feels less nice.

I’m here to give you agency – and concrete steps that help you land your next role 4X faster.

(Related: Can ChatGPT Create A Resume That Doesn’t Suck?)

Step 1: Elevate Your Executive Brand.

More often than not, when I view the LinkedIn profile of a person who feels overlooked by the system, I immediately see the problem.

The headline is generic. The value proposition is vague.

It’s sprinkled with familiar buzzwords like “strategic”, “commercial”, and “results-driven”. But it offers no insight into the person’s worldview, values or any other differentiators.

Moreover, claiming that you’re strategic isn’t useful – because at your level it’s table-stakes.

You need to demonstrate that you’re strategic – in a way that’s relevant to the business you’re targeting.

That does not mean the person lacks value. It means the value is not legible. Undifferentiated.

And that matters, because recruiters and hiring leaders are not sitting around trying to interpret your career like archaeologists dusting off a fossil.

Step 2: Supercharge Your Outreach.

At the senior level, you must not rely on job boards to land your next role.

You need to do outreach.

Cold. Hard. Outreach. Yep, the kind most people don’t like doing.

But most people don’t achieve what they want in life. And if you want extraordinary results, you need to do extraordinary things.

Most of it is untargeted. Generic. Often written in a way that makes it obvious the sender has done almost no research.

That is not outreach. It is spam dressed up as effort.

So rather than adding more faux sympathy to the pile, I’d like to show you what world-class outreach actually looks like in the wild.

Meredith Chandler recently shared the email she used to beat 1,399 other candidates and secure a Head of Sales role.

The reason it works is not because it is clever in a gimmicky way. It works because it does two things most outreach fails to do:

She did not open with a long explanation of why she was amazing (even though she is). She did not ask the hiring leader to figure out why she might be relevant.

Only then did she introduce herself as the solution.

Her experience section was short. The proof was easy to verify. The social proof was built in through mutual connections. The CTA was light. Even the P.S. showed she had paid attention.

That is a very different game.

Of course, the obvious objection is that you cannot scale this kind of outreach. Yes, that is correct – and is the point.

A message like this takes work. You need to understand the company, the hiring leader, the role, the team, the likely problem, the commercial context and the angle that makes your background relevant.

But that is exactly why it works – because almost nobody does it properly.

Most candidates are trying to win through volume. More applications. More recruiter messages. More LinkedIn connection requests. More “just checking in” notes sent into the void.

But senior hiring rarely rewards volume. It always rewards relevance.

Find a real business problem. Show that you understand the context. Connect your background to that problem. Make the proof easy to verify. Keep the ask light. Sound like someone who has done the work.

Because in a world of people churning out low-effort work, the overprepared person wins.

I don’t want to butcher Meredith’s own analysis of why her email worked, so I’m pasting it below for you to learn from – without edits. Enjoy!

#1 The Subject Line

Arguably make-or-break.

I used his exact wording from a recent LinkedIn post.

The best way to stand out amongst one thousand other emails titled: “Interested in the Head of Sales role” is to repeat their own words back to them.

#2 I introduced a problem.

I didn’t start with:
“I’m amazing.”
“I crushed quota.”
“I was the #2 out of 160 AEs”

I made it about HIM and his current situation: a growing team of AEs with no management.

#3 I named his team members directly.

I referenced people already on the team and the outcomes they were driving.

That showed I did my homework and already thought like an insider.

#4 Only THEN I introduced the solution:

Hire me.

Not before.

#5 I kept my experience section short.

Resume attached.
Metrics included.
Numbers spoke for themselves.

No four-paragraph story about one deal I closed in 2021.

(And yes, of course I also sent an Aligned Room )

#6 I added social proof.

I mentioned mutual connections he could quickly check with if he wanted validation.

Fast trust.

#7 I kept the CTA low pressure.

Instead of: “Are you free Tuesday at 2:00?”

It was: “If this is interesting, happy to chat.”

Execs are busy. I didn’t even expect a response for at least a week.

#8 The P.S.

Underrated part of cold emails.

Another opportunity to prove I researched the company. I understood the vision.

I paid attention.

Most people apply to jobs.

Top sellers run a sales process.

There’s a difference.

Even in interviews.

*Especially in interviews.

A few years ago, you could get away with a “me-too” executive resume. You know, the one that opened with a “Strategic Objective” and talked about your “results-oriented” and “dynamic” nature.

If you apply for a serious role with a resume like this in 2026, you can expect to hear silence. A lukewarm conversation with a bored recruiter at most.

Why the change? A perfect storm of factors:

What Boards & CEOs Care About In 2026.

You won’t land a serious executive gig just by talking about what you’ve done.

You’ll land it by positioning yourself as the answer to a painpoint that keeps Boards and executive teams up at night.

What do they care about? I’m glad you asked. Heidrick & Struggles surveyed 930 top leaders to find out what issues they are most – and least – confident about facing.

Above: Economic uncertainty tops the list (Sorry for the low-contrast, fiddly image).

If I was applying for a senior executive (VP, EGM, C-suite, Group Executive, etc) role in 2026, I’d make every effort to tie my achievements to the factors that CEOs and Boards are least confident about:

If you have direct experience with any of these four issues, you’re already ahead of the pack.

But even if you don’t, you can position your current experience in a way that gives you more credibility in one of these areas.

For example, if you wanted to highlight your ability to help a business during geopolitical uncertainty, think of the times you had to make difficult strategic decisions in a low-information environment.

Or think of times you protected margin in volatile conditions.

Or the time you’ve led people through a crisis without destroying culture or losing headcount.

And if you wanted to demonstrate your ability to deliver ROI on AI infrastructure, think of times you made confident bets on unproven technology – and won.

Don’t make the mistake of simply sprinkling “AI”, “resilience” and “transformation” throughout your executive resume. The market doesn’t need more noise.

Your priority when writing your resume is to reposition yourself through the lens of the business priorities I laid out earlier.

Because the person who secures the top role will be the one who makes the employer think, “This person understands the pressure we are under – and has evidence that they can help.”

Irene

Most executives think their resume must explain what they have done. They view it as a historical document listing responsibilities and achievements.

This is a mistake.

You are not a journalist. Don’t attempt to write a Pulitzer-level, balanced piece of prose that presents the reader with raw and unbiased facts, allowing them to reach their own conclusion.

Your resume is not a chronological recap of your work history.

It is a piece of forward-looking propaganda (or, if you prefer a more polite term – “marketing”).

Above: Use this 2X2 matrix to highlight the most relevant, impressive parts of your background.

Its job is to shape a reader’s perception of you – by presenting a strategic narrative that positions you as the answer to a specific business point.

In other words, your resume needs to explain what your career means.

The challenge is that at the senior level, your broad leadership career can mean many things:

Chances are, most of the above are true. And you’ll be tempted to mention all of them, positioning yourself as a jack of all trades who can do it all.

But you won’t be remembered for any of them.

Senior hiring does not work like a slow, generous reading exercise. A CEO, board member or search partner will not spend 20 minutes trying to lovingly connect all the dots of your career.

Signal that you’re a low-risk, high-ROI answer to their client’s commercial challenge.

This is where the old “historical career summary” approach to resume writing fails.

If you indulge me in a car analogy for a moment, it makes you look like a Toyota.

There’s nothing wrong with a Toyota, you might object. It’s one of the highest-selling cars in the world. It’s reliable. Reasonably competent at everything.

And you’d be partially right. There is a time and place for a Toyota. When you want something to show up and do the exact same thing every time, without fail.

There are plenty of “Toyota-grade” executive roles out there.

They usually involve the riveting task of babysitting a group of C-players at a company that’s going precisely nowhere. You show up, clock in at 9 and clock out at 5. A bums-on-seats operation.

If my intuition is correct, your only choice is to craft an executive resume that helps the market understand:

That usually means making hard choices. Some details need to be cut. Others need more weight.

Critically, your previous roles must be repositioned through the lens of your next career step.

This can be uncomfortable for senior leaders – because the more successful you become, the more you have to leave out. But a strong resume is not built by showing the fullest version of your career. It is built by showing the most commercially relevant version.

Irene

Here’s a mistake I see constantly. A senior executive decides to get active in the market – and immediately defaults to the broadest possible positioning.

“I’m looking for a significant leadership role” – because they’re very experienced – “in any industry” – because they learn fast – “based in a major city” – because the kids need a good school.

For a recruiter or search firm partner, this is not a useful brief.

Yet, many senior leaders fall into this trap. They try to keep their options open by staying broad.

It also makes you almost impossible to place.

Counterintuitively, narrowing your focus increases your opportunities  – because the market will recognise your value and know when to think of you.

Before you reach out to a single person, get three things locked in.

1. Pick The Right Direction.

Choose your next role based on where market demand meets your experience and values – not just what you’re good at.

Don’t ask yourself “what have I done?” but “where has my work created the most measurable value?”

Your next step is to ruthlessly eliminate options – until you’re left with the one that best aligns with your values.

Because competence and fit are not the same thing.

The hard part is knowing whether the lack of satisfaction you’re feeling is a sign that you:

(Related: How Arielle Executive Strategic Positioning Works).

2. Set Concrete Boundaries.

If you’re struggling with the task above, start by removing smaller pieces.

First, decide which sectors are wrong for you – so you can stop pretending they’re not.

Next, determine which cities actually work for you as a base. (Yes, a stint in Singapore looks exotic on your resume – but Singapore is also a hot concrete jungle).

Rule out running an Australian outpost of an international company – if you’re tired of odd working hours, living on planes and reporting to a CEO in Frankfurt or San Francisco.

The key decision here is balancing the size of the business with your seniority (e.g., step up to the C-suite at a 500-person scale-up or take another functional role at a 10,000-person company?).

A great tie-breaker here is usually the type of culture you thrive in.

3. Build A Narrative That Sells.

You’ve decided on your next step. But you can’t go to market with a $25 AI-generated resume from Fiverr.

A strong resume is a forward-looking business pitch that demonstrates your fit at the next level up.

Unfortunately, most leaders have resumes that look like backward-looking chronicles of their careers.

If that’s you, invest in a professionally-written executive resume and a LinkedIn profile that convey your commercial value.

Because at your level, every day translates into thousands in opportunity cost.

(Related: How To Write A Resume For The Australian Market).

Think about it this way – if professional help moves you into a role with a $50,000 higher base salary, 6 months earlier, the documents have paid for themselves during your first month in the role.

As humans, we under-estimate opportunity cost.The real cost isn’t the money you spend. It’s staying invisible for another six months while you wait to see if the DIY version works.

Never Spray And Pray Search Firms.

Once your positioning is clear, you’ll be tempted to go wide.

To blast your resume to every recruiter on LinkedIn. To send a generic note to two hundred people with “exploring new opportunities” in the subject line.

This is the executive equivalent of spray-and-pray. It feels productive. It achieves almost nothing.

Strategic outreach means three things:

What Top Candidates Are Doing To Win.

Executive candidates who are landing roles in 2026 are treating their search like a campaign – with a target market, a value proposition, a channel strategy, and a timeline. They’re deploying the tactics I described above in a systematic way.

Candidates who are failing treat their job search like a lottery.

Irene

After years of dire warnings, have the robots finally come for our jobs? Four companies with a strong presence in Australia announced layoffs in February and March –

WiseTech Global, Commonwealth Bank, Block (formerly Square), and Atlassian.

Yet, the evidence for a widespread AI jobs takeover is weak right now.

The Australian labour market is showing resilience (unemployment is at a low 4.1%).

The US jobs market is softer but still steady, with the jobless rate at 4.4% and slow job growth.

(Related: Your Career Just Got An Expiry Date).

Increased automation is obviously having an impact – and will likely keep having an impact.

But there’s a gaping divide between what generative AI (GenAI) models are potentially capable of, and how they’re actually being used.

Why?

Why AI Is Becoming The Perfect Excuse For Layoffs.

The people selling, or investing in, AI tools have been among the loudest voices shouting that human workers will soon be obsolete.

For example, the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, made news at the start of the year when he claimed that most professional tasks “will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”  

Alongside its US$13B investment into OpenAI, Microsoft sacked over 15,000 employees in 2025 – citing AI-driven efficiencies.

Atlassian, meanwhile, has reasons to be nervous.

The company is at risk from AI-native competitors.

It’s been building its own GenAI solutions – and spent almost $1 billion last year to acquire an AI web browser that will be integrated into its products.

In March 2026, the company slashed 1,600 jobs, ostensibly because AI had changed “the mix of skills we need,” and “the number of roles required”, according to CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.

One Atlassian employee who spoke anonymously to the Sydney Morning Herald questioned that narrative, saying “I personally think we overhired, and [Cannon-Brookes is] hoping the stock price goes up as a result”.

Job cuts by payments company Block this year that saw 40% of its headcount go were also criticised for so-called ‘AI-washing’.

AI expert and Associate Professor at The Wharton School, Ethan Mollick, said Block’s job cuts were dubious because AI tools were still so new and “we have little sense of how to organise work around them.”

“Is Block’s announcement just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing?” was the question posed by former Block employee Aaron Zamost in an op-ed for The New York Times.

(Related: How To Get More Job Interviews And Job Offers).

Stanford University Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who studies workplaces and modern business management, said in response to the op-ed: 

University professors like Pfeffer must be taken with a pinch of salt, as decades in academia are not a substitute for real executive business experience.

Yet he is right that improving margins by adopting AI signals that a company is innovative. Going places. Part of the zeitgeist.

How Close Is AI To Replacing Jobs?

No bones about it, agentic AI tools are powerful. And they’re rapidly imporving.

But the fact that AI tool is capable of doing something, isn’t the same as being able to reliably replace a real worker.

The widely-referenced METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) task-completion time horizon graph shows AI agents’ capabilities are advancing exponentially.

Such measures show a trend, but have limitations.

So, the latest Claude model, for example, cannot independently code software for 10 hours.

Instead, it has a 50% chance of successfully performing tasks that might typically take humans 10 hours.

The CEO of Anthropic said one year ago (March 2025) that by now (March 2026) AI could be writing “essentially all of the code” in the software we use.

While some companies, including Microsoft and Anthropic, have been able to offload substantial amounts of coding duties to AI, the pace of adoption outside big tech is nowhere near as rapid.

Recent research by METR also shows that using AI actually slows down the work of software programmers due to the added time spent prompting and reviewing the tool’s outputs.

Not just a little slower either —-19% slower.

Another study that analysed real work activity of 164,000 workers, over more than 443 million hours, found AI was making work more complicated and intense.

More time spent emailing or in business management tools. More hours are worked on weekends.

The Future Of Work May Not Involve Humans.

It seems clear that knowledge workers will be disproportionately impacted by AI compared to blue-collar workers. Computer-based work is more ripe for automation.

It’s no wonder that many companies are experimenting with AI or using tools like Microsoft’s Copilot.

Yet these AI programs remain small-scale and often fragmented across one or two business functions.

There are plenty of barriers to adoption:

A 2025 report from MIT Media Lab showed:

The report also found limited layoffs from GenAI.

Letting AI entirely takeover essential functions that shape a company’s success is also risky.

Global fintech Klarna learnt the hard way.

It replaced 700 customer service roles with bots in 2024, but backtracked a year later because the AI alone wasn’t good enough.

CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in May 2025 that Klarna would be looking to hire more humans to handle complex enquiries:

Even when the tools have matured, AI taking over jobs isn’t necessarily the most cost-effective way forward.

Or what’s best for society, which could see governments step in to regulate.

A recent report found that automation and offshoring of roles to AI could have a cumulative net negative impact on Australia’s GDP – whereas using AI to augment the current workforce could add over $1 trillion to our economy.

McKinsey’s North America Chair Eric Kutcher, said in January 2026 he thinks organisations will embrace hybrid AI-human workflows that will require fast learners and judgement-based roles.

How To Make Your Job AI-Proof.

A recent viral post by CEO of AI writing assistant software platform HyperWrite, Matt Shumer, urged people to “get proficient” at AI with urgency, because the latest models are ready to take over almost every white collar job within “one to five years.” 

Respected author of ‘Everybody Writes’, Ann Handley responded to Shumer’s thesis, to say, “Do not panic.”

The timeline is murky, and Shumer has vested interests, she argues.

She thinks the exponential curve of AI job displacement will likely hit a wall – “not because of technological limits, but because real-world adoption is messy and human-shaped.”

She acknowledges we’ll all face the imperative to learn AI skills, but suggests the timeline will be longer than 2-5 years as everyone grapples with change.

Shumer may be right when he says that the people who will thrive will be those who become “comfortable with the pace of change itself.”

Jody

Back in 2016, a job board called The Ladders published a study that quickly became one of the most frequently cited studies in the history of the Internet.

Their earth-shattering discovery?

Recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds on your resume – before deciding whether to keep reading or to move on to the next candidate.

(I hope whoever commissioned this study got a promotion – I’m sure the ROI was astronomical).

As immensely time-poor creatures, recruiters default to the 7-second constraint in an attempt not to drown in the sea of sameness that floods their inboxes every day.

What Recruiters Actually Look At in Those 7 Seconds.

Let me start by clearing one myth – recruiters are not likely to print your resume out. Those stock images where recruiters are shuffling a stack of resumes are lying to you. Sorry.

Above: Not quite. I call BS.

Two scenarios are far more likely. The recruiter will either open your resume:

The second scenario is particularly problematic for you as an executive jobseeker – and where the 7-second rule is likely to compress to less than five.

A phone’s tiny screen is not optimal for viewing resumes.

The recruiter will be looking for any excuse to stop reading – so you must do everything you can to not wear out their already thin level of patience (learn how below).

The recruiter likely has 3-7 open roles they’re trying to fill. Each will attract a flood of 20-100 executive applicants, depending on the role and the size of the company.

This means that while scanning your executive resume, the recruiter is likely wondering how they’ll get through the remaining 100 or so resumes in their ATS inbox.

(Related: Australia’s Best C-Suite Resume Writers).

Why Most Executive Resumes Fail The Test (And How To Pass).

The profile tells the recruiter with 90% accuracy what will follow. Make sure you nail it. This means not kicking off your resume with a dull sentence like “Results-driven CFO…”

Think about the commercial challenge you’re uniquely positioned to solve – and lead with that. For example –

Dense walls of text make recruiters cringe.

Make sure you don’t cram the page with small text. Leave plenty of white space and ensure your font is no less than 11px.

Don’t use precious real estate on listing self-evident responsibilities. Australian jobs are fairly uniform, and saying you “managed a team of 100 to streamline warehouse operations” is a missed opportunity.

A better approach is to use the C-A-R (Challenge – Action – Results) framework to flesh out your achievements in a way that showcases your commercial impact. For example –

Last but not least, ensure that your resume isn’t too technical.

A lot of executives (especially with backgrounds in engineering) experience inertia in how they describe themselves.

They fall back on familiar, geeky, techy, detailed language – instead of explaining how their work impacted strategic outcomes like:

I recommend that you view the 7-second rule as a useful constraint that challenges you to elevate your executive resume.

Without such constraint, your resume would be wordy and generic.

Having this limit will force you to reconsider each word, ensuring you replace fluff with a commercially meaningful story that does your career justice.

Irene

Both job seekers and recruiters are ruthlessly using AI tools to succeed. But neither party is actually succeeding. AI resumes create two issues:

Both foster mistrust.

AI-generated resumes give you the illusion of progress. It’s true – you can churn one out using ChatGPT or Claude AI.

But AI was trained on millions of resumes.

So AI is replicating what was terrible. It’s giving you the average of mediocre. 

Moreover, if every candidate is using the same commoditised AI tools, how can you expect to differentiate your application?

Don’t Succumb To The Temptation To Lie.

You may be tempted to embellish your resume using AI.

Don’t.

AI-inflated applications reveal their true colours during short-listing and interviews.

Or, worse, once you get the job.

Underperformance will show up fast, creating a cascade of unfortunate events – you losing your job, hurting your reputation and being back to square one.

How Recruiters Are Using ChatGPT To Cut Corners.

Unfilled roles equal lost productivity. That’s why automating candidate application and screening processes has been a long-held recruiter goal.

AI is making their dreams come true (but creating new nightmares for job seekers).

Research from consulting firm BCG finds that of the companies experimenting with AI, 70% are using it for talent acquisition — and it’s noticeably increasing their admin productivity.

This helps reduce costs while keeping hiring timeframes short.

A 2025 survey of over 1,200 HR professionals in Australia and New Zealand showed that:

AI automation is seen as driving those kind of efficiencies — as evidenced by over 30% of Aussie HR pros describing the tech as “transformative” and 57% saying they were increasing their budget for AI tools. 

Recruiters want to ditch more of the ‘busy work’ by using AI for writing job ads and candidate emails, long-listing massive amounts of applications, scheduling interviews, and even conducting first-round interviews — as big brands like Woolworths and Bunnings have embraced.

That’s supposed to give them time to focus on high-value human work. Like assessing short-listed candidates.

But getting on that shortlist is tough.

Here are some grim facts facing job seekers right now:

Fewer openings, more competition, and automated screening means you’ll need both luck and timing when applying via traditional routes.

Applicant Tracking Systems and other AI-powered recruiting platforms can assess applications almost immediately after you’ve hit ‘submit’.

On top of unknowable criteria and algorithms potentially ruling you out — you can be perfectly qualified for a role, but arrive too late.

Understandable then, that if you’re job hunting, AI can seems like the best way to speed up your application process.

You can use AI to create and tailor resumes, find and quickly apply to multiple jobs, do mock interviews, and even generate interview responses if you get that far.

But using AI to save your time and energy in this way represents a false economy.

Getting in first doesn’t matter if your resume sucks. A professional-sounding, error free resume churned out by a bot is not the same as a resume that:

AI Is Dragging Down The Quality Of Job Applications. 

Despite a faster hiring process, employers are still desperate for quality, especially in mid-tier professional and executive-level roles.

There’s a huge trust and credibility chasm emerging because AI is capable of making every resume sound competent and professional, in the same cliched or over-the-top fashion.

That’s creating four key risks for job seekers using AI to grow their careers:

Firstly, AI resumes that all sound alike (because AI models learn by copying) make it hard for recruiters to differentiate between similar candidates. That leads to second-guessing whether you’ve got the abilities you claim.

Your chances of being shortlisted are starting to plummet if there’s a whiff of AI-style embellishment, which many recruiters can spot easily. Not because you chose to use a tool for writing help, but because they can’t believe what your resume says. 

Over 80% of Aussie employers said they’d noticed inaccurate information in AI-generated resumes, and a notable increase in under-qualified applicants (54%), according to a 2025 survey of over 500 firms.

Australian recruitment expert Michelle Rubinstein, a former Recruitment, Consulting & Staffing Association (RCSA) Recruiter of the Year, recently said she favours communicating with candidates by phone for this very reason.

She recalls the case of having to reject a candidate who, on paper, appeared to be an “absolute slam dunk,” because when she called them they:

Rubinstein said that after some digging, the truth came out that an AI-tool had auto-applied on the candidate’s behalf and rewritten their CV for the job.

Let’s say an AI-inflated resume does land you a job. 

You’ll be taking a huge gamble if your performance doesn’t hold up.

One recent hiring manager survey found than more than a third of employers had terminated multiple employees due to their actual skills falling short of their AI-generated resume promises.

Over 70% of hiring managers said they now consider referrals more reliable than resumes.

How Do You Avoid AI Traps In Your Job Hunt?

Is honing your skills with AI tools — to game AI screening tools — ever worth your time?

You might decide so if you’re vying for low-skilled or entry-level roles that requires cold applying at scale to a broad selection of advertised jobs via recruitment systems.

As HR consultant Jessica D. Winder highlights, AI can help tighten your stories, but it can’t replace your lived experience.

If you really want to take back some control, a more proactive job search is possible. But it’s not easy. You need to do all the things, and do them consistently and well.

The core pillars include:

You don’t have to reach ‘influencer’ levels of visibility. You just have to get known within the circles of people with influence over hiring in your desired companies or sectors.

You want to initiate conversations with the hiring managers whose day-to-day problems you’ll actually be solving.

Unlike in-house recruiters whose job it is to sort through the AI slop applications, hiring managers are the leaders who make the case for a new hire, and make the final hiring decisions.

HR teams act as the gatekeeper, partly in an attempt to keep recruitment consistent and fair.

But let’s be honest — you need an unfair advantage.

Career coach Lucy Gilmour calls it “boss hunting”. She suggests you:

Bypassing an ATS or AI resume screening tool isn’t a panacea for getting noticed. You may still be ignored. But catch a hiring manager on the right day, with the right pitch — and your foot is firmly in the door.

AI Resumes Have Eroded Trust. Take A Different Path.

AI misgivings are pervading every step of the recruitment process.

Sydney-based recruiter Chloe Cashman said she knows hiring managers running virtual interviews now have doubts about whether they’re assessing real capability or “well prompted answers” derived from AI.

With the way AI resumes and AI-assisted answers have muddied the waters, we’ll likely see some HR teams revert to more traditional methods to engage with candidates for important roles, even if it adds time and costs — in the interests of improving hiring quality.

Become the kind of candidate who shows up in the right places to get noticed. Don’t be afraid of looking desperate or pushy.

Do be afraid of missing an opportunity — and let that fear motivate you to invest your efforts into selling yourself with authenticity and dignity.

Jody

Up to 80% of executive roles are filled without ever being advertised. No job board. No public hiring process. Just network taps.

If you’re approached for one of these roles, don’t allow their attention to go to your head. You’re not “in.” You’re under scrutiny.

This is not the moment to send a generic resume. At executive level, relevance wins. Your executive resume must do one thing: prove you are the solution to that business’ commercial challenge.

That requires tailoring. Here’s how to do it properly.

(Related: What Is The 7-Second Rule For Resumes?)

1. Do Your Due Diligence.

You can’t demonstrate that you’re the best fit for the job if you don’t actually know much about the job.

When you’re approached to submit your resume – whether it’s by a recruiter, an industry colleague, a current company decision-maker, or anybody else – you’ll be tempted to send it off as soon as possible.

You want to get your details into the right hands, after all. Right?

Tamp down your sense of urgency – and get more details about the open role so you can create a document that makes a strongest possible impression.

Dig into these 3 areas:

2. Study The Job Description.

Tailoring of your resume doesn’t start with your resume.

It starts with the job description.

Review it carefully. Pull out keywords, areas of experience, and competencies the employer is looking for.

You’ll end up with a list of qualities and descriptive words that are important to the potential employer.

Here’s an example job description that shows important keywords (highlighted in yellow) and key areas of experience (highlighted in red).

Above: Job description for a Director of Sales & Marketing at Accor.

Summarising this information, you can see this company is looking for a candidate who:

Other themes and keywords that bubble to the surface include innovation, excellence, inspiring, and uniqueness.

3. Tweak Your Resume’s Headline.

With a better sense of exactly what the employer is looking for, it’s time to turn your attention to your resume headline.

This goes directly under your name on your resume. It must reflect not just the experience you’ve already had but also the role you hope to fill.

You don’t want to misrepresent your experience here. But in most cases, you should be able to use the title of the open role.

It’s a simple way to demonstrate an immediate match.

For example, if your resume currently says “Head of Sales and Marketing”, you would change it to “Director of Sales and Marketing” when submitting your information for this vacancy.

You could even go a step further and bring the luxury hotel experience directly into your headline. That might look like this:

This seemingly small change can make a huge difference when catching the attention of the hiring decision-makers.

4. Customise Your Resume’s Profile.

Your profile (often also called your professional summary or your career summary) appears near the top of your resume.

This is one of the first areas a potential employer will review.

Revisit your highlighted text to see how you can swap in some of those details.

Take a look at this before and after for some inspiration.

We start with a fairly boilerplate, generic resume profile –

And by adding phases from the job description, we transform it into a profile that tells the recruiter you’re a match for the role.

5. Refine Your Resume’s Key Assets.

Your resume’s front page must include either a skills chart or a bulleted list of your key assets.

You can apply a similar strategy to what you used for your profile here by:

6. Revisit The Professional Experience.

I don’t recommend that you make substantial changes to the professional experience section of your resume without guidance.

If you had your resume professionally written, the writer made sure that your experience is aligned to the roles you discussed.

However, there is one small tweak you can make to sharpen this section’s alignment: change the order of your bullet points.

As you did in your key asset section, you can move responsibilities and achievements that are particularly relevant toward the top of your work history.

This subtly changes your value proposition.

In the example above, strategy development and team leadership are two crucial responsibilities. If you have evidence of these in your past position, move them up so they get the spotlight.

Irene