Welcome to 2026, everyone.
It is time for me to start lining the bottom of my monitor with topics. I have a variety of topics to talk about for the first month. I am so excited, and I just cannot hide it. I am about to lose control, and I think I like it.
That last line isn’t mine. I borrowed it from a song. Do I owe someone a royalty? It seems like that is what fifty percent of the Carl Complainy-pants people who hate AI complain about. I play whack-a-mole with them on LinkedIn, cheerfully, because whack-a-mole is fun, but also because I am trying to help people stay employed.
“I hate these AI tools; they will destroy my job!” is mostly a problem for people who go to work wearing shirts with AI on them featuring a red circle around it and a line through it. When the bean counters come in and say, “We are doing great with the people who have leaned in on productivity-enhancing tools, but we have some redundancies; who is not on the bus to AI-Town?” You can guess who gets in the crosshairs of the pink slip cannon.
But that is not today’s conversation.
Today, we are going to do what I vaguebooked last week.
I want to talk about hiring in the age of AI.
This came up as one of the things I wanted to talk about when last year, I accidentally shot my impressions through the stratosphere on this subject. I have done some successful engagement farming on LinkedIn, but this? This was some next-level stuff.
So it stands to reason that people want to talk about how to hire in a world loaded with AI tools, some of which are designed to foil the hiring process.
So what are the problems?
The first one is the easiest one to solve for, and it is self-obvious enough; I am just going to put my junk on the table.
“A different person showed up to work than I interviewed.”
People are having other people interview for their jobs. How crazy is that?
The best thing to do here is to take a picture at each stage of the interview and post it to a hiring medium (folder, file, Slack channel) so that everyone can see that it is the same person, or not.
Make sure that person matches what they look like when they get to work, too.
It goes without saying that you should never hire a remote worker who will not turn on their camera. I will accept a blurry background.
If you are running your interview in expert mode and are afraid of someone being a bad actor trying to get a job, the easiest thing you can do to enable them is to not look at them.
Camera isn’t working? The interview is over. Next candidate, or reschedule for when the camera is working.
This is an example of the problem, and it is not even the freakiest one. Someone built a tool to sit in on your interview and answer your questions for you.
In 2025, I did not see these problems for about half of the companies I was working with, and I will confess, “I want to interview a bad actor as a candidate” became a bucket list item for me.
Why wasn’t I seeing these candidates? I kind of panicked. It turned into an obsession.
The answer was ultimately not surprising. It was because I was interviewing for hybrid roles. It is harder to be a remote super secret spy angling to get at your digital goodies when you need to show up in Hoboken, NJ, twice a week.
I have recently started helping companies recruit for fully remote roles internationally, and boy oh boy, that is a very different world.
You have a lot of questions that you have to answer, and sometimes people will sneak through the interview. It has gotten crazy enough that when someone is interviewing, I am tempted to take a screenshot of their wristwatch, or a clock in the room, or the reflection of their screenshot to look for what time it is… Some people I have interviewed have lied about their country of origin and making sure they are in the correct time zone by detective work has crossed my mind. Are you in London? Open the windows at noon, I want to hear some church bells.
So to recap:
- People might have other people do their interviews
- People might be in a country other than the country they declared
- People might be cheating in real time on their code tests
- People might be cheating on any take-home assignments
So, how do you hire successfully in 2026?
I have refined a hiring playbook, and I am going to use this as a launchpad for joining the modern-day expert coaching community. I will have more on this later, once I have gone beyond the Ghostbusters “Guys, get her!” level of planning. I have Meetings With Experts on this. Everyone says they want a solution. Let’s see who has some dead presidents for an hour-long conversation on this subject. There is a lot more to come on this subject soon.
