Resumes Remain Hiring's Most-Used -- and Most Misleading -- Signal, New eSkill Report Finds - PR Newswire

Resumes still dominate the hiring process at most U.S. organizations — but HR professionals increasingly doubt the information inside them. That is the central finding of eSkill's 2026 Hiring Signals Report, which surveyed 1,056 U.S. HR and people operations professionals in August 2026 on the methods their organizations use versus the ones they actually trust.

**A widening signal gap** While 77.8% of respondents say their organizations use resumes in hiring, 52% identify the resume as the single signal most likely to be exaggerated, embellished, or misleading — a disconnect that the report calls the "signal gap." Trust in candidate-provided information has also broadly eroded: nearly half of respondents (47.9%) say they trust it less than they did two years ago.

The backdrop is a hiring environment growing harder to manage. Some 56.6% of respondents report more applications per open role compared with 12 months earlier, and 52.2% say their screening teams are spending more time per hire as a result.

**AI amplifies the credibility problem** Concerns about artificial intelligence are shaping how HR professionals view candidate data. Some 78.8% of respondents are at least somewhat concerned about candidates using AI tools to misrepresent their qualifications or abilities. That anxiety is, in turn, driving interest in AI-powered solutions: fraud or misrepresentation detection ranked as the most-wanted AI-enabled hiring feature, selected by 49.6% of respondents.

**What HR professionals actually trust** Skills assessments and structured interviews each earned selection among respondents' most-trusted hiring signals at 43.9%, well ahead of resumes at 35.0%. Work samples and simulations present a particularly sharp gap between perceived value and actual adoption: 52.4% of respondents rate them as extremely or very predictive of job performance, yet only 19.1% say their organizations currently use them.

Trusted signals also vary by role type. Skills assessments lead for skilled trades and technical field hiring; structured interviews are preferred for professional and knowledge-work roles; certification or license verification tops the list for clinical and licensed healthcare positions.

**Skills validation on the rise** Looking ahead, 58.2% of respondents expect their organizations to expand formal skills validation over the next 12 months. The primary obstacle, according to the survey, is speed: slower time-to-hire is the most frequently cited barrier to verifying skills more thoroughly.

"Hiring managers still overly rely on traditional hiring flows, even as they become less and less predictive of success on the job," said Thomas Marks, VP of Marketing at eSkill. "At eSkill, we're educating organizations on how to shift to signals that actually work, skills assessments and work simulations among them."

The full 2026 Hiring Signals Report is available at eskill.com. eSkill is a pre-employment assessment platform offering customizable assessments, job-relevant simulations, and work samples across more than 600 subject areas.