Can your applicant tracking system be gamed?

Yes, and this episode of The Missing Manual shows you exactly how to check. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down AI resume prompt injection, the practice of hiding invisible instructions inside a resume that tell an AI screener to move a candidate forward regardless of fit.

Research out of Duke University found the pattern in roughly one percent of a 200,000-resume sample, and Julia and Jenny explain why that number is likely to grow as more applicant tracking systems bolt on AI without telling buyers exactly what it touches.

The conversation moves quickly from the resume problem to the vendor problem. Jenny lays out the two-pronged defense every hiring team needs: work directly with your ATS vendor to ask how they're arming against prompt injection and how they red team their own technology, and separately, test your own process by building a candidate application specifically designed to break it. Julia and Jenny are direct about what happens next if that test reveals a real gap. It is not something to quietly patch. It is a conversation for legal and HR leadership.

The back half of the episode turns to the human side of AI hiring fraud: candidates and employers misrepresenting themselves, deepfake interview avatars, a low-tech but effective way to catch one on a video call, and a real story about a former employee who got someone else to sit in for their interview. Julia and Jenny close with the harder truth underneath all of it: candidate behavior is going to keep evolving, and the organizations that fare best are the ones pressure testing their hiring process regularly instead of setting it once and walking away. The Missing Manual exists to name exactly this kind of unwritten rule before it costs you.

Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.