I never thought I'd miss the days of reviewing terribly designed and grammatically lacking resumes for engineers, but in 2026 here I am. AI has offered great efficiencies in hiring - but it's become impossible to differentiate good candidates from bad ones, let alone humans from AI bots. Our hiring pipelines have become AI against AI, and no one is winning. If you've struggled to hire, or even interview, a real person, I invite you to learn from my strategies of how to recruit, filter, and find real people to join your engineering teams. I'll present real ATS data of trying to hire a Principal Engineer in 2026, share tips for helping human candidates punch through the application noise, and present strategies on how to monitor changes in patterns of AI verbiage as they evolve. (looking at you, emdash)