As more employers adopt artificial intelligence in early-stage hiring, the gap between being qualified on paper and being hireable in practice is becoming harder to ignore, according to Vinay Jain, Co-founder of NexxaScreen, an AI-based interview and hiring assessment platform. He argues that many fresh graduates are still preparing for interviews as if a strong résumé and rehearsed answers are enough, even as recruiters increasingly look for reasoning, adaptability, and the ability to respond under pressure.

Jain says the biggest problem is not necessarily a lack of degrees, certifications, or internships, but an inability to handle unfamiliar situations in real time. “Most rejections are not caused by a lack of qualifications. Candidates often have strong degrees, certifications and internships. The real issue emerges when they are asked to think through an unfamiliar situation,” he says. “The gap is not knowledge. It is the ability to approach ambiguity and break down problems in real time. Hiring has moved beyond résumés, but preparation often has not.”

That, he suggests, is one reason the résumé is losing weight as a decision-making tool. While it still helps candidates enter the process, he says it can no longer show how a person responds when the brief is unclear or when the problem has no obvious answer. “A résumé captures a candidate’s past activities... What it cannot reveal is how that person thinks when confronted with uncertainty, ambiguity or a problem they have never encountered before,” Jain says. “Two candidates with identical résumés can demonstrate completely different levels of reasoning through that interaction. The résumé still plays a role, but it now serves primarily as an entry point rather than the deciding factor.”

At the same time, he cautions against treating AI hiring systems as neutral or complete substitutes for human judgment. He says such tools can create more consistency at scale and may reduce the weight traditionally given to college pedigree, but they also carry risks, especially if scoring models reward fluency, polish, or historically embedded biases.

Jain also argues that colleges need to rethink how they define employability. “When placement statistics become the primary success metric, the focus often shifts toward training students to pass interviews rather than preparing them to succeed in the workplace,” he says. “Instead, colleges should create learning environments where students are regularly required to think in real time... Communication should be treated as a core professional skill rather than a peripheral elective.”