ABC Radio National: Rudy Crous on how to get hired in the AI age

Compono co-founder and CEO Rudy Crous joined Lisa Leong on ABC Radio National’s This Working Life to answer the question a lot of job hunters are quietly worried about. How do you get hired when a machine reads your application before any human does?

He appeared alongside Dr Natalie Sheard, a lawyer and McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, whose research looks at discrimination by the AI systems now used to screen, rank, and interview candidates.

Both sides of the table are using AI now

Rudy’s advice to candidates starts with accepting the situation rather than fighting it.

“AI is here to stay. The reality is don’t avoid AI, use it to your advantage.”

That means writing a CV the screening system can actually read: keywords from the job ad, clear job titles you really held, plain formatting, and nothing decorative.

“Remove anything with graphics or tables that can confuse the AI.”

Getting past the filter is only half of it. Rudy’s point is that the shortlist is where the machine stops and a person starts.

“There’s the AI that screens you in or screens you out, but there’s still a human at the other end that is going to help discern whether you’re going to fit the organisation and the job.”

He also told Lisa that employers are trusting CVs less and less, with candidates and screening systems now locked in a quiet arms race over who wrote what.

The question employers should be asking their vendors

This was the part of the conversation aimed squarely at hiring teams. Recruitment has always been about discerning capability, and Rudy argued the risk sits in the tool doing the discerning, not in the act itself.

“When you’re looking at vendors, don’t just look for the cheap and cheerful and the thing that looks amazing and has great user experience. Stop for a second. Ask the vendor about the psychometric properties of the tool. What’s the validity? What’s the reliability?”

“Those same rules should apply for AI tools that are screening, ranking, and matching candidates.”

Buy an assessment and you would ask for the evidence. Buy an AI screening tool and most organisations ask for a demo. That gap is where the discrimination risk Dr Sheard researches quietly gets built into a hiring process.

What still works in an AI interview

For anyone facing a bot or an avatar instead of a person, Rudy’s advice was unglamorous and unchanged: know the job, hit the key criteria, and keep each answer to 90 to 120 seconds using the STAR method (situation, task, action, result).

“Frame all of your answers alongside that. And again, practise like an athlete.”

And for the interview question that refuses to die, the one about what fruit you would be:

“It’s not about the fruit. You can say whatever fruit you want. It doesn’t matter. It’s about how you articulate that answer and the logic in your argument. It’s looking for your ability to think quickly, structure sentences in a coherent way, and provide a logical answer.”

Listen to the full episode

This Working Life is presented by Lisa Leong on ABC Radio National. The full episode, “How to get hired in the AI age”, runs 25 minutes and includes Dr Natalie Sheard on what the research says about AI hiring tools and discrimination.

Listen on ABC listen

Rudy has written a longer piece on what the episode raised, including the question he thinks hiring teams should be asking their AI vendors: AI can get you shortlisted. A human still decides.

Compono is an Australian talent intelligence platform that combines behavioural science, psychometrics, and AI to help organisations hire, engage, and develop people with evidence behind the decision. Compono is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Capterra and is used by government departments, mid-market enterprises, and growing companies across Australia and New Zealand.

Media enquiries: media@compono.com