What candidates want employers to get right about AI

Key takeaways:

• This article offers a five-step suggested process for incorporating new AI-enabled recruitment processes without fuelling misgivings among your talent pool.
• The article also shares findings from a recent Indeed/YouGov survey in the US. Among the findings: 40% of employers say AI implementation is a top goal for 2026. But just 13% of jobseekers are enthusiastic about it while 35% are concerned.
• Find out how healthcare company Midland Care prioritises qualified candidates more quickly by using Indeed Smart Screening to follow responsible AI practices: making sure it is assistive, explainable, embedded and customisable.

Your AI roadmap won’t matter if candidates don’t trust the route. ‘Trust among employees and employers is at an all‑time low’, says Indeed Senior Talent Strategy Advisor Kyle M.K. ‘Jobseekers say, “I’ll take care of myself because my employer won’t”. Employers say, “I’ll cover my priorities, but I don’t trust the economy or market”.’ 

According to a recent US Indeed/YouGov survey,¹ this tension is only growing. Employers entered 2026 confident and growth-minded, but their priorities are at odds with their talent pools. Half of employers want to increase headcounts, but fewer than a third of jobseekers expect to land a good job. Jobseekers want salary growth (64%), putting pressure on employers’ main goal of cost control (40%). And, as organisations ramp up AI implementation (40%), just 13% of jobseekers are excited about it – and a third are concerned.

That’s the disconnect slowing recruitment today: leaders are optimising for efficiency while candidates are prioritising security. ‘In this environment, efficiency without clarity only burns your brand’, says M.K. 

In this article, we share a four-point checklist for responsible AI use in recruitment. See how to follow the success of healthcare company Midland Care in implementing responsible AI and tackling hiring goals transparently.

Responsible AI checklist: alleviate candidate fears

‘Employers are focused on AI and costs; jobseekers are worried about dehumanisation and automation’, says M.K. ‘There’s a big mismatch in priorities and expectations’.

To address misgivings with any AI implementation, transparency is the name of the game. Here’s a quick checklist for clarity with AI in recruitment:

✅ Explainable: gives the ‘why’ behind its behaviour

✅ Assistive: helps recruiters prioritise and verify but doesn’t decide for them

✅ Customisable: empowers your team to use their own judgement to monitor results; ask your vendor if they have a Responsible AI team

✅ Embedded: works inside existing workflows to minimise disruption

How Midland Care expedites recruitment with responsible AI

To see how these qualities look in practice, we can follow one healthcare company’s journey to more efficiently review candidates with AI. Midland Care is a non-profit, Kansas-based organisation that delivers integrated community care for the elderly. It hires across clinical and non-clinical roles with licence requirements, including CNAs and LPNs. 

Midland Care juggles three main pain points:

• High-volume applications with an uneven mix of qualified and unqualified talent
• Credential requirements for key roles, such as CNAs and LPNs
• A lean recruitment team

Here’s how Midland Care is using Indeed Smart Screening to efficiently address its challenges, using the four-point AI checklist: 

Explainable. Midland needed to enable the recruitment team to focus on applicants aligned with the role's essential criteria. Indeed Smart Screening’s AI screens applicants from Indeed using the criteria that Midland defined in the job description and assigns each a Smart Fit Score™: a 0–100 rating showing how closely an applicant aligns. With it, recruiters receive:

• A recent experience snapshot surfacing key details from the CV
• A flagged-for-review section that calls out potential gaps
• Licence status validation, where applicable, by requesting document uploads**
• A bot-mitigation check to help make sure the pipeline is filled with genuine applicants

Assistive. These features allow recruitment leaders to set fast-track rules: Midland’s team first focuses on those with an 80–90 Smart Fit Score™. Those with lower scores get a scan to confirm whether there’s something worth exploring. And, with potential gaps surfaced upfront, recruiters already know what to ask about during a phone screen, instead of unexpected issues arising later. 

‘It really helps us prioritise – we move the high scores through quickly and come back to lower scores when we have more time’, says Natalie Johnstone, Talent Acquisition Manager at Midland Care.

Customisable. At the same time, recruiters maintain control, not substituting the tools for human review. Indeed makes its responsible AI policies publicly available.

Midland’s team can modify the screening criteria and the system provides options to give feedback, edit or disregard the candidate Smart Fit Score™ entirely at the recruiter’s discretion.

Embedded. For employers using Indeed Connect (a free subscription when you enable Indeed Apply that unlocks the ability to add Smart Screening), applicants automatically land in the applicant tracking system (ATS), creating a consistent experience. Midland’s team uses Paycom, one of Indeed’s integrated ATS partners, meaning they don’t need to navigate back and forth between systems.

The results? Across 10 roles, Midland’s recruitment team saw its time-to-recruit reduce to 42.6 days, about 14% lower than the industry average – a significant difference in a market where time-to-fill is nearly double the national average. Recruiters are also able to focus their initial interviews on only the most qualified candidates.

A 5-step process for transparent recruitment with AI

1) Publish your responsible AI and evaluation principles

• On your careers sites, spell out where AI assists in recruitment and what it considers – such as skills, recency or credentials – but make clear that humans have final say.
• Disclose risk of bias. ‘When 1,000 CVs go through the system, what patterns and risks do we see?’ asks M.K. ‘This helps underrepresented candidates build trust’.

2) Define skills-first criteria

• Define must-have vs nice-to-have criteria and adjacent skills that candidates can learn on the job. State these explicitly in job descriptions and rubrics.
• Go for scenario-based interview questions or simulation-based assessments mapped to your critical skills and score against standardised rubrics. ‘Today’s employers want people who can move and flow with change rather than push against it’, says M.K.

3) Surface ‘go/no-go’ signals early and set fast‑track rules

• Assistive, explainable signals add efficiency. Set up objective evaluation instructions and automate early CV summaries at the top of your hiring funnel.
• Create fast‑track pathways and use areas of concern to focus early conversations.

4) Create actionable feedback channels

• Provide feedback channels, opt-outs and possible appeal paths for candidates. ‘If a jobseeker is very uncomfortable with AI in the process, allow them to opt-out or request an appeal’, advises M.K. ‘It might still be a “no”, but at least they’ll feel heard’.

5) Reinvest saved time in people, not process

• Keep humans in the loop for all decisions. ‘Trust is built in the moments that can’t be automated’, says M.K. ‘When AI handles the mechanics, recruiters should reinvest that time into building community – through deeper conversations, clearer growth paths and transparent human judgement’.
• Use the time saved with automation to have conversations around mutual fit and values alignment, and build visible development paths for new recruits.

In 2026, leaders can’t have efficiency without trust. Leaders who clarify what matters, standardise how they judge and use assistive AI to remove friction – not people – will win. 

¹Indeed Survey with YouGov 2025, Total N=2,019 jobseekers and 1,019 employers.

**Licence and credential verification coming soon

Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruitment or legal adviser, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions, and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.

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