When job applicants use AI

Some companies freak out when candidates use AI. For go-to-market (GTM) roles, I’d freak out if they didn’t!

It’s 2025, people! Asking a marketer not to use AI is like asking Taylor Swift not to use glitter.

Look, I WANT candidates who use AI. In-fact that gives us a better opportunity to evaluate them.

Think about this: When hiring, you want to evaluate how clearly people reason, communicate, and understand your business – and you can find out those things by reading their prompts!

How to evaluate candidates' use of AI

So let them use AI, but ask them to show you their prompts. When evaluating them, look for 3 things:

1. Did they provide clear initial instructions with sufficient context? A good prompt should read like instructions to a highly intelligent but inexperienced intern with zero context. Are they bringing in details about your business, messages, products and target audience?

2. Do they use advanced prompting techniques, like example outputs, chain-of-thought prompting, or even allowing the LLM to ask clarifying questions?

3. Did they take the initial output as-is? Or did they exercise editorial judgment and iterate? If they iterated, was their judgment sound, did the feedback show a sense of “knowing what good looks like?” Did they provide good coaching to improve the answer?

Bottom Line

Look, the basics haven't changed - good hires still need to understand your customer psychology, data, and tech stack. They need to be bright and curious, and experiment and learn quickly. But the tools improve weekly, and people who don't use them will get left behind.

I wrote this post in partnership with Danny Martinez of the Hiring Humans Substack.