Professionals with AI skills earned a 56% wage premium in 2024. Up from 25% the year before. (PwC)
Not tech workers. Professionals in non-technical roles. Accountants. Finance leaders. HR. Operations.
That single statistic should change how every working professional is thinking about their career, and how every employer is thinking about their hiring process. But most companies are reacting too slowly, and most candidates are getting lost in the shuffle.
Here’s what we’re seeing in the field, and what we think leaders and professionals should be paying attention to.
The job search has changed on both sides of the table.
Candidates now have a 24/7 career coach. They tailor resumes to every job using the same language as the job description. They research the company, the hiring manager, and the team before they ever apply. They show up to interviews more prepared than ever.
The flip side is that AI has made it easier to apply to anything, so people are applying to more roles, faster. Volume on every requisition is up. Employers are leaning on AI to manage that volume. And in the process, good people are getting weeded out.
Because here’s the thing: AI wasn’t built to find the best candidate. It was built to get a pile of 500 resumes down to 50, to find the most obvious one. Those are not the same thing.
AI is a pattern-matcher, not a recruiter.
When AI reads a resume, it’s looking for keywords, titles, tenure, and dates. It is not reading the way a recruiter or hiring manager reads. Three kinds of strong candidates quietly fall through the cracks:
- The candidate with a gap. A human looks at ten years of strong experience and a one-year gap and asks about the gap. AI filters the resume out before anyone sees it. We recently presented a candidate to a client who had already applied through their ATS. They never saw her resume. She’d been flagged for a one-year gap, a gap she spent caring for a parent before coming back to a bigger role than she left.
- The candidate whose title doesn’t match. A “Revenue Operations Manager” at one company is a “Sales Operations Director” at another. Titles aren’t standardized across organizations. AI doesn’t know that. An experienced recruiter does.
- The candidate with a non-linear path.* Five years running their own business before returning to corporate reads as an anomaly to a system. A human sees entrepreneurial experience, P&L ownership, and resilience.
If you’re using AI to manage volume, that’s understandable. But someone on your team needs to be asking: who is falling through?
AI fluency is now a comp driver.
This is the part that should be reshaping how professionals think about their careers and how employers think about compensation.
The 56% wage premium isn’t theoretical. It’s already showing up in the job descriptions. AI skills are now mentioned in 30% of accounting postings, up from 18% in a year. 43% of finance postings now require AI skills, up from 33%. HR doubled its share of AI-mentioning postings in 2025, from 4.4% to 8.8%.
This isn’t about being a technical expert. It’s about being comfortable with the tools, knowing where they add value, and bringing that thinking back to the team. Employers want candidates who will figure out how to use AI in their function and improve the work, not candidates who can build the models themselves.
One of our clients recently ran a Chief of Staff search with a written assignment as part of the process. The last section was a bonus question: how did you use AI to complete this assignment? Not to penalize. To evaluate judgment. That’s the kind of screen we’re starting to see across roles.
The shift in what employers actually need.
A CPA partner told us recently that AI is now doing the work his junior accountants used to cut their teeth on. Reconciliations. Transaction coding. The repetitive tasks that used to fill the first two years of a career.
So what is he teaching them instead? Management skills. Critical thinking. Client judgment. The work AI can’t do.
This is the shift every knowledge worker should be paying attention to. The professionals who stay valuable are the ones who double down on what AI can’t replicate:
- Leadership. AI can generate an answer. It can’t lead a team through a hard quarter.
- Relationships. A fractional CFO with a 15-year relationship with a banker can get a credit line extended with a phone call during a cash crunch. AI can draft the memo. It can’t make the call.
- Judgment. AI flags anomalies. It doesn’t always know why something is unusual or whether it matters. You do.
- Accountability. Someone still has to own the outcome.
Candidate experience is a culture signal.
One of the most common complaints we hear from candidates right now is being ghosted. No feedback. No update. No close-out. The volume is up, and employers aren’t keeping up.
Here’s what employers should remember: how you show up during the hiring process is exactly how candidates assume you show up as an employer. If a candidate gets ghosted while you’re trying to recruit them, what do they think happens once they’re on the payroll?
A few practices that actually work:
- Communicate the process upfront. Number of rounds, timeline, who they’ll meet. Set expectations.
- Stay consistent. Same process for every candidate at the same level.
- Close the loop. Even a short “we’re moving in a different direction” email takes 30 seconds and tells candidates a great deal about your culture.
What this means for candidates.
Write your resume for the machine and the human. Use the keywords the system is looking for, but don’t lose the narrative. A resume stuffed with keywords and no story will pass the filter and lose the person reading it.
Don’t rely on the application alone. One of the best placements we’ve seen recently was a COO who found the CEO on LinkedIn, sent a thoughtful message, and got a response. The application alone would not have gotten her there.
Use AI. Pick one tool relevant to your work and use it on something you do every day. The learning curve is short. The signal to employers is real.
What this means for employers.
Audit what your AI is filtering out. The strongest candidate isn’t always the one with the cleanest keyword match.
Name AI fluency in your job descriptions for non-technical roles. It signals that you’re paying attention to where the market is going.
Protect candidate experience. Communication, consistency, and closing the loop are not nice-to-haves. They are recruiting tools, retention tools, and brand tools all at once.
The final thought.
AI is part of hiring now, on both sides of the table. That’s not going to change, and the companies that use it well will move faster, screen smarter, and free their teams to focus on the work that matters.
But sophisticated tools don’t make a great place to work. People do. Culture does. The way you treat candidates during the process and employees once they’re in the door does.
The organizations winning on talent are the ones using AI as a tool, not as a substitute for the human judgment, communication, and care that make people want to work somewhere.
Candidates are doing their research before they ever apply. They want to know what kind of place this is. That question is worth answering before they ask it.
If your hiring process is leaning more on AI than on humans, and you’re wondering whether the right people are making it through, we should talk. Risch Results is a national retained executive search firm placing key talent in sales, finance, accounting, HR, and operations for U.S. growth organizations and Israeli startups expanding into the U.S.