Spending More Time With Candidates Recovers The Signal AI-Polished Resumes Took Away

Resumes arrive polished, consistent, and harder than ever to tell apart, with an estimated 40% to 80% of applicants now using AI to write them. Employers have answered with more interview rounds, structured questions, and assessments that ask candidates to show what they can do. Those methods are harder to apply at the executive level, where one leader shapes how an entire team works for years and no single test settles the decision. What fills the gap is the time a hiring team spends with a candidate, and what it decides to look for in that time.

Working through this problem daily is Andre Amyot, VP of Talent & Culture at Laurentide, an industrial controls and automation group serving Eastern Canada. Amyot leads across six companies and roughly 800 to 900 employees. He previously spent nearly six years as VP of Strategy, Culture and Organizational Development at Ceratec. Before that, he advised Fortune 500 and Quebec companies as a senior organizational development consultant.

"You can't fake in person. If how you present yourself doesn't represent how you presented yourself on paper, then we completely disconnect," Amyot says. His team spends as much time with candidates as it can, treating those conversations as the strongest evidence available. The company is flat, and people across its six businesses work in close contact with one another. Amyot wants candidates to feel that same closeness while they're being hired.

Reading past the polish

Amyot doesn't fault candidates for using AI to write their resumes. His team has stopped expecting the document to separate one candidate from another. "Resumes look more and more the same. You can tell they're polished by AI, and I understand why," Amyot notes. "If I had to redo my resume, I would probably do the same thing."

Meeting candidates repeatedly has limits of its own. Amyot watches how many in-person rounds a process asks for, since a long process can cost his team the candidate. Online interviews carry their own problem, with many hiring managers now reporting AI-generated answers in the conversations they run. "Since remote work, people tend to dislike meeting in person, so we don't do it as many times as we would have in the past," Amyot explains.

The change competency

The competency Amyot won't compromise on for senior roles is managing change. Companies used to treat it as a separate skill, hired for on top of the core competencies a role required. ERP and HR system rollouts, AI-driven work redesign, and economic shocks now arrive without pause. He describes his CFO spending a night working out what a new round of tariffs meant for the business, then briefing the leadership team the next day. "Managing change is just part of the job. It's not an additional skill the way it was in the past," Amyot says.

In Amyot's view, managing change means leading people through it, not running the technical project that delivers it. A candidate who describes an AI rollout entirely in phases and milestones misses what he's listening for, and he'll ask directly what the plan means for the people doing the work. "If someone tells me their objective is to implement AI, and they only talk about the technology and the steps, and they never talk about the people in the company, that for me is a big miss," Amyot explains. "They should talk about people first."

Testing for the skill is harder, since every candidate arrives with a change story, including those who lived through one rather than leading it. Amyot's team asks behavioral questions tied to situations candidates have already handled. A story that sounds too simple, or too far from the candidate's own decisions, gets sent back for a different example. Psychometric results give another read on behavior, and a further interview round works through the blind spots they raise. "Even if we do all those things right, it's only when the person is working with us that we really know," Amyot notes. "You can never be 100% sure."

Hiring for fit, not perfection

Amyot's advice to other people leaders starts with clarity about the role, tied to company strategy and purpose over a single mandate. His team also brings future colleagues into the process, so a marketing hire meets someone from the marketing team and someone from sales before a decision. A CTO role with many stakeholders is where he says that exposure counts for most, though defining the job has to happen before any of it starts. "You need to be sure that in your selection process, you spent enough time with that person, and that they have spent time with other people in the organization," Amyot explains.

The candidate who checks every box doesn't exist, and Amyot believes looking for one is the wrong goal. "You don't want to find the perfect people. You just want to find the right people for you," he says. A wrong executive hire also costs more than the replacement search, since good people leave once the wrong person is in the role. Under time pressure, the temptation is to take the strongest name in a weak field. "Use your judgment and pass if you need to," Amyot concludes. "Some of the best hiring decisions I've made are the ones where I passed."