AI has made it easier than ever for job seekers to tailor resumes, incorporate the right keywords, and turn their experience into polished application materials.
Monster’s AI Resume Trends Report shows how quickly AI is becoming part of the resume landscape. This analysis of 75,000 resumes found that AI-related terms appeared on 12.8% of resumes in 2025, up from 3.4% in 2023.
That can be a good thing. Candidates have better tools to communicate their qualifications, and employers may have an easier time identifying relevant skills. But when nearly anyone can create a polished, keyword-rich resume, some of the signals recruiters traditionally relied on become less meaningful.
So what does a strong resume still tell employers? And what should hiring teams look for beyond the words on the page?
Monster’s recruiting, career, and workforce experts agree on one thing:
The resume still matters.
But polish alone is no longer enough.
Here’s what they had to say.
The Substance Behind the Resume Matters More
AI hasn’t changed the fundamental question recruiters are trying to answer: Does this person have the skills and experience required for the role? What has changed is how much recruiters can infer from the presentation alone.
Shanon Castro, Talent Acquisition Specialist, looks beyond polished language to the candidate’s actual career history.
“I still look closely at their work history, the progression of their career, and how they explain their roles and responsibilities. For me, those are some of the areas I trust most because they give me a better understanding of the actual experience behind the resume.”
Vicki Salemi, Monster Career Expert and Talent Strategy Advisor, sees a similar distinction.
“AI can improve how candidates present those qualifications, but it can’t create the underlying experience or credentials out of thin air.”
Specificity still matters. Strong resumes show responsibilities, accomplishments, career progression, and measurable results that give recruiters something substantive to explore.
Abby Konet, Director of Talent Acquisition and Managed Services, believes AI has raised the baseline for what a polished resume looks like.
“When anyone can generate a polished, keyword-rich summary in seconds, flawless writing no longer signals elite capability; it signals standard digital fluency.”
Instead, she looks for harder-to-replicate signals such as the scope of a candidate’s work, tangible outcomes, realistic career progression, and enough operational detail to explain how those results were achieved.
The polish may get attention. The substance behind it is what makes the resume meaningful.
What to Look for Beyond Resume Polish
As AI makes polished language and keyword alignment easier to produce, employers need to look more closely at the evidence behind the presentation. A strong resume should give hiring teams substantive signals they can explore and verify throughout the hiring process.
- Specificity: Look for details about the candidate’s actual responsibilities, tools, decisions, and working relationships. Broad statements such as “led strategic initiatives” reveal little without context about what the work involved, who participated, and what the candidate did.
- Scope: Consider the size and complexity of the work. Did the candidate support one client or an enterprise-wide program? Manage a small project or a cross-functional initiative? Numbers are useful, but scope can also be demonstrated through team size, geographic reach, budget, audience, volume, or level of responsibility.
- Outcomes: Strong candidates connect their work to credible results. Look for improvements in revenue, efficiency, quality, customer experience, risk, or other relevant measures. During the interview, ask how the result was calculated and what changed because of the candidate’s work.
- Progression: A career path does not have to be perfectly linear, but it should show how the candidate has developed. Look for increasing responsibility, deeper expertise, broader scope, new skills, or intentional career moves that make sense in the context of the opportunity.
- Ownership: Resumes often describe team accomplishments without clarifying the candidate’s individual contribution. Ask what the candidate personally owned, which decisions they made, how they worked with others, and where their responsibility began and ended.
- Judgment: Experience is not just about what someone did. It is also about how they thought. Ask candidates why they chose a particular approach, what alternatives they considered, what tradeoffs they made, and what they would do differently now. These questions can reveal decision-making ability that polished resume language cannot.
- Relevance: A candidate does not need to have held the exact same title or followed a conventional path. Focus on whether their experience, skills, and judgment transfer to the work the position actually requires. This is where clear job requirements matter: employers can evaluate relevance more effectively when they have defined the capabilities and outcomes that are truly essential.
No single signal should determine whether a candidate moves forward. Together, however, these elements help hiring teams distinguish a well-written application from well-supported experience. The resume remains the starting point; the interview and broader evaluation process determine whether the substance behind it holds up.
The Resume Opens the Door. The Conversation Tests the Signal.
A strong resume can identify a promising candidate, but our experts believe that conversation has become even more important for understanding the experience behind it.
For Shanon, the goal isn’t to determine whether a candidate used AI. It’s to understand whether they can speak credibly about the work presented on the page.
“I don’t think it is necessarily fair or productive to try to determine whether a candidate used AI simply based on how their resume is written.”
Instead, she uses the conversation to ask candidates to explain their experience, knowledge, and skills in their own words.
Vicki takes a similar approach.
“If I saw something interesting on a resume, I flagged it as a green light to learn more.”
If a candidate says they led an initiative that improved efficiency by 30%, for example, she wants to understand what the initiative involved, what the candidate specifically did, how the improvement was measured, and what happened as a result.
Krysha Abbott, Talent Acquisition Specialist, says that once baseline qualifications are established, other signals often become the real differentiators.
“Their confidence and comfort level with the role, their ability to relate their own experience to it, and their willingness to show curiosity and genuine interest all have a much greater impact than the resume itself.”
AI can help candidates make a stronger first impression, but as AI-polished resumes become more common, that signal becomes less remarkable. Hiring conversations still help employers determine whether the experience behind it holds up.
Employers Need to Focus on Signal Quality
From the employer perspective, AI is also changing what differentiation looks like.
Ryan Friedlander, Senior Director of Channel Sales, sees authenticity becoming more important as resume language becomes easier to standardize.
“If everyone is using the same tools, everything starts to look and sound the same. That makes authenticity and differentiation even more important.”
The signals employers relied on in a pre-AI hiring environment are shifting. Polished writing and keyword alignment still have value, but they may reveal less when technology can reproduce them at scale.
That matters because candidates are already optimizing for the signals employers send. Monster’s Application Black Box Report found that 40% of candidates regularly modify their resumes to include keywords from job descriptions.
Ryan believes employers should put more weight on signals such as real results, relevant experience, career choices, skills, and candidate intent.
For Thad Price, SVP of Marketing & Strategy at Monster, that represents a broader strategic shift.
“AI is not making the resume irrelevant. It is changing which parts of the resume are meaningful. When presentation becomes easier to optimize, employers have to focus less on how polished an application appears and more on the quality of the signals behind it.”
The question for employers becomes bigger than whether a resume looks good. Do the signals used throughout the hiring process actually identify the people most likely to succeed?
That may require employers to reconsider what they prioritize, how they evaluate candidates, and where resumes fit within a broader view of talent.
Verification Should Add Signal, Not Friction
If a resume alone tells employers less, the natural response may be to add more ways to validate candidates. But more evaluation doesn’t automatically mean better evaluation.
Abby recommends using deeper conversations and practical evidence rather than putting candidates through long, generic assessments.
“Evaluate work samples, code repositories, or short scenario-based discussions instead of long, generic take-home assignments.”
She also cautions employers against treating AI use itself as a negative signal.
“Evaluate candidates on their actual subject matter expertise and real-world judgment, not on whether they used a tool to format their experience.”
Vicki similarly believes employers can verify skills without adding unnecessary burden. A relevant existing work sample or a focused exercise may reveal more than asking candidates to complete hours of unpaid work early in the process.
The goal isn’t to make candidates prove themselves repeatedly. It’s to introduce signals that help employers understand what candidates can actually do.
Better Matching Starts With Better Employer Signals
Candidates aren’t optimizing their resumes in a vacuum. They’re responding to the information employers and hiring systems give them.
Monster research suggests there is significant room for improvement on that side of the equation. Only 10% of workers in Monster’s Job Description Report say job descriptions always accurately reflect the reality of the role, while 85% say they would be more likely to apply if employers clearly outlined the challenges and expectations of the job.
Thad sees that as an important part of the broader marketplace challenge.
“Candidates can only respond to the information employers give them. If a job description is vague, overloaded with requirements or disconnected from how candidates will actually be evaluated, job seekers are going to optimize for whatever signals they can identify.”
Clearer requirements give candidates better information about whether they are a genuine fit. They also give recruiters stronger, more relevant signals to evaluate in return.
As AI makes optimization easier on both sides of hiring, the goal shouldn’t be to win a keyword-matching contest. It should be to create a clearer connection between what the employer actually needs and what the candidate can actually bring to the role.
The Resume Isn’t Disappearing. Its Job Is Changing.
None of our experts expect the resume to disappear.
It remains an efficient way to establish baseline qualifications, understand someone’s career history, and decide whether a deeper conversation makes sense.
But it increasingly looks like one signal among several.
Abby describes the resume as moving from a standalone gatekeeper to an initial anchor, supported by work samples, portfolios, conversations, and other evidence.
Vicki agrees that resumes will remain central to hiring, but employers will increasingly look beyond them to understand demonstrated skills and experience.
Job seekers shouldn’t take this as a lesson to avoid AI. The goal is for them to make sure there’s substance behind the polish. Additionally, employers need to remember not to confuse a perfectly optimized resume with a perfectly qualified candidate.
As technology reshapes both sides of hiring, the strongest matches will come from better signals: clearer employer expectations, authentic candidate experience, demonstrated skills, and meaningful conversations.
Because AI can polish the resume but it still can’t replace the experience behind it.
About Monster Expert Perspectives
Monster Expert Perspectives features insights from Monster’s recruiting, career, and workforce experts on the trends shaping the future of hiring.
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