By the Live Assets Team, with insights from Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO
You uploaded your resume to a portal. You recorded a video answer to a prompt. You took an online assessment. By the time a human sees your name, an algorithm has already decided whether you make it to the next round. Welcome to IT interviewing in 2026.
If you’re an IT professional searching for your next role right now, the rules have changed. Quietly, but completely.
The interview process you remember from a few years ago, phone screen, technical chat, in-person meeting, decision, is gone for most companies. In its place is a multi-stage funnel where artificial intelligence plays a leading role at almost every step. Resume parsers.
AI-powered video screens. Behavioural analysis. Skills assessments graded by algorithms. Even chatbots that conduct first-round interviews.
According to a 2026 Greenhouse report, nearly two-thirds of job seekers have now been interviewed by AI, up sharply from just six months earlier. And here’s the kicker: 70% of those candidates were never clearly told AI was evaluating them.
That’s not a small shift. It’s a fundamental change in how IT professionals get hired.
The good news? You can prepare for it. The better news? When you know what’s actually happening behind the scenes, you can show up with more confidence — not less.
What’s Actually Happening Behind the Hiring Curtain
Before you can prepare, you need to know what you’re preparing for.
Here’s what’s likely happening to your application before a human ever lays eyes on it.
Stage 1: Your Resume Meets an Algorithm
You hit “submit” on your application. Within seconds, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is scanning your resume, looking for keywords, formatting, work history patterns, and how well your background matches the job description. Roughly 87% of companies now use AI somewhere in the hiring process, and resume screening is where it shows up first.
If your resume isn’t optimised for that scan, you’re filtered out before any human knows you applied. It doesn’t matter how qualified you are.
Stage 2: One-Way Video Interviews
You get an email asking you to record video responses to a set of questions. No live interviewer. Just a webcam, a timer, and a list of prompts. You record, you submit, and an AI tool analyses your responses.
Some tools assess what you say. Others claim to assess how you say it, tone, pacing, eye contact, even facial expressions. The technology is controversial, increasingly regulated, and not always accurate. But it’s widely used. And if you’ve never done one, the experience can feel disorienting.
Stage 3: AI-Graded Technical Assessments
Coding challenges, technical scenarios, problem-solving tests, many are now graded by AI in real time. Some platforms also monitor your behaviour during the test: tab-switching, eye movement, multiple faces on camera, suspicious typing patterns. The goal is to detect candidates who might be using AI to cheat. The side effect is that honest candidates can feel like they’re being surveilled.
Stage 4: A Human Finally Enters the Picture
If you make it through, a recruiter or hiring manager reads what the AI has surfaced about you. They review the scores, the rankings, the “fit” indicators. And then, finally, you might get a real conversation.
“There’s a hard truth in all of this: the IT professionals who understand how the modern hiring process works are getting through. The ones who don’t are getting filtered out before they ever get a chance to show what they can do. That’s not fair, but it’s the reality. And it’s exactly why preparation matters more than ever.”
— Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
How to Prepare for an AI-Driven IT Interview Process, Without Losing Yourself
Here’s the philosophy we want you to start with: don’t try to game the system. Try to understand it. The candidates who do best aren’t the ones using AI to fake their way through. They’re the ones who use the technology to prepare more thoughtfully, and then show up as themselves.
1. Optimise Your Resume for Both Algorithms and Humans
Your resume needs to pass two readers: a machine that’s scanning for keywords, and a human who’ll glance at it for seven seconds before deciding to read more.
For the algorithm: use the exact language from the job description where it genuinely applies to your experience. If they say “AWS,” don’t say “Amazon Web Services.” If they say “DevOps engineer,” make sure that title (or something close to it) appears in your resume. Use clean formatting, no tables, no graphics, no unusual fonts. ATS systems struggle with anything fancy.
For the human: use specific accomplishments, not generic responsibilities. “Led migration of 12-service architecture from monolith to microservices, reducing deployment time by 60%” beats “Responsible for cloud infrastructure” every single time.
2. Practise One-Way Video Interviews Before You’re In One
If you’ve never recorded yourself answering interview questions, do it before your first real one. Set up your phone or laptop, look directly at the camera, and answer common behavioural questions out loud. Watch it back.
You’ll be surprised. Most people are. We say “um” more than we think. We look down at our notes too often. Our pacing is off. The good news: every one of these things is fixable with practice.
For the actual recording, choose a quiet, well-lit space. Plain background. Eye contact with the camera lens, not your screen. Speak in clear, structured answers using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) for behavioural questions. And do not read off a script. AI tools can detect it, and even when they can’t, humans can.
3. Rehearse Your Stories Out Loud, Not in Your Head
Here’s a mistake we see all the time: candidates think through their answers but never speak them out loud until they’re in the actual interview. Then they freeze, ramble, or forget key details.
Pick five or six common interview questions and rehearse your answers verbally. Time them. Aim for 60 to 90 seconds per answer. Long enough to be substantive. Short enough to keep attention. AI tools and humans both reward clarity.
4. Use AI to Prepare, But Don’t Let It Speak for You
Here’s where we want to be direct. Roughly 70% of job seekers now use generative AI for interview preparation, and we think that’s largely a good thing. Use it to research the company. Use it to anticipate questions you might be asked. Use it to draft and refine examples from your own experience. Use it to brainstorm questions you should ask the interviewer.
What we don’t recommend: using AI live during an interview to feed yourself answers. It’s increasingly easy to detect. And even when it works, you’re getting a job that doesn’t actually match your skills, which means the first 90 days will expose what the interview hid. Nobody wins.
The IT professionals who get hired into roles where they thrive are the ones who know what they actually know, and can talk about it confidently.
5. Prepare for Behavioural Questions Like They Matter, Because They Do
Many IT candidates over-prepare for technical questions and under-prepare for behavioural ones. That’s a mistake. Especially in AI-driven screens, behavioural answers are often what differentiates similar candidates.
Have specific, recent examples ready for: a time you handled conflict with a colleague, a project you led under pressure, a technical decision you regretted, a moment you mentored someone, a failure you learned from. Make them real. Make them yours. Make them about 90 seconds long.
6. Ask Whether AI Is Being Used, and What It’s Evaluating
This is something most candidates don’t think to do, but it’s well within your right to ask. If you’re invited to a video interview, ask the recruiter: “Will this be reviewed by an AI tool? What is it assessing?” In 2026, transparency is becoming an expectation, and good companies will tell you. Companies that dodge the question are giving you useful information about how they treat candidates.
You can also ask whether you can request a human-only interview as an alternative. Some companies offer this; some don’t. Either way, you’ve gathered real intelligence about the culture before you’ve signed anything.
7. Don’t Forget That a Human Still Makes the Final Call
Despite all the AI noise, 74% of candidates surveyed in 2026 say they prefer human involvement in final hiring decisions, and most reputable companies agree. AI can screen and rank, but the offer almost always comes from a person.
That means everything you’d traditionally do to prepare, researching the company, understanding the team, preparing thoughtful questions, dressing appropriately, sending a follow-up note, still matters. Maybe more than ever, because by the time you’re talking to a human, you’re past the gauntlet. Don’t blow it on basics.
The Honest Take From Inside the Industry
We won’t pretend we love everything about how AI is reshaping hiring. The lack of transparency in many processes is a problem. The bias risks are real. The candidate experience is often poor, half of all rejected candidates in 2026 report being declined without a single word from a human, with most assuming a machine made the call.
But pretending it isn’t happening doesn’t help anyone. The IT professionals who understand the new landscape, prepare thoughtfully, and show up as themselves are the ones moving forward. The ones who assume the old rules still apply are getting filtered out without ever knowing why.
“AI in hiring isn’t going away. But neither is the human side of it. The candidates who win are the ones who treat the technology as a stage to get through, and the human conversation as the moment that actually counts. Because that’s still where great hires get made.”
— Lilo Thekkekara, Head of Talent – IT, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
Where a Recruiter Actually Helps in an AI World
Here’s where we’ll be honest about what we do and why it matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago.
When you work with a boutique IT staffing firm like Live Assets, you skip a significant part of the AI gauntlet. We’ve already had a real conversation with you. We already know your skills, your goals, and what you’re looking for in your next role. When we present you to a client, you’re not a name in a stack of 400 resumes, you’re a person we’re recommending personally, based on a relationship we’ve built.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never face an AI screen during the process. Some of our clients still use them. But it means a human has already advocated for you. Your name is already in the room. The conversation starts at a different place.
For 20+ years, we’ve believed that great IT careers are built on relationships, not algorithms. That belief is more relevant now than it’s ever been.
Get to the Finish Line
AI is in your interview. There’s no avoiding it. But the candidates getting hired right now aren’t the ones trying to game the system or pretending it doesn’t exist. They’re the ones who understand what’s happening, prepare with intention, and show up as the real version of themselves, the version a great team will want to keep around for years.
Prepare for the algorithm. Show up for the human. That’s the formula in 2026.
Looking for your next IT role, and want a human in your corner?
Whether you’re actively searching or just curious about what’s out there, we’d love to have a real conversation about your career. No bots. No filters. Just two people figuring out what’s next.
Get in touch today, here.
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