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Hiring for AI Skills Without Getting Played
From Day One Editors
May 20, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
Dani Monaghan knows exactly what’s going on when a job candidate pauses mid-sentence before answering questions, their screen suddenly switches, or their eyes dart to the side during interviews.
“There’s a lot of tells,” she said. As the SVP of global talent enablement at Expedia Group, Monaghan has learned to spot the subtle signs that someone is using AI to cheat during the hiring process. However, Expedia also wants to recruit people who are skilled, comfortable, and ethical in their use of AI.
It’s a fine line, and one that Monaghan explored in detail during a fireside chat with Rob Smith, the executive editor of Formidable, at From Day One’s Seattle conference.
Preventing candidates from cheating the hiring process with AI doesn’t require banning its use. Instead, Expedia sets explicit boundaries. “We are very clear with candidates where they can use AI in a process, and where they cannot use AI in a process,” Monaghan said. “We want them to use AI. Those are the people that we want to hire, people who know AI, and are comfortable with AI, but ethical standards are equally as important to us.”
Expedia uses both human observation and technology to catch dishonest candidates. Monaghan notes that the company even employs one of its vendors’ AI cheating-detection tools.
The line becomes particularly delicate for roles where problem-solving with large language models is part of the candidate’s assessment.
“We want them to problem solve and be able to explain to us how they solve the problem with AI, ethically and responsibly,” Monaghan said. Candidates who can articulate how they tested for bias, trained their models, and validated outcomes demonstrate the kind of AI literacy Expedia prizes. Those who try to game the system, however, reveal a character mismatch that outweighs any technical brilliance.
Mapping Where AI Belongs
Expedia didn’t rush to deploy AI in hiring and then figure out the ethics later. “If you just put AI on a bad process, you have a worse outcome,” Monaghan said.
Instead, the talent team remapped its entire hiring journey, deciding precisely where AI excels and where humans must retain control. “We’ve built a roadmap for where we would use AI, where AI does its best work, and then where we would use humans, where we do our best work. But ultimately, the human is the final decision maker and the stamp of approval.”
That roadmap has already produced powerful tools. Monaghan described an AI agent that handles hiring-manager intake meetings, generates job descriptions, gathers competitive intelligence, and even estimates time-to-fill, all in real time.
Getting Rid of Bias Before It Begins
AI bias is one of the most discussed risks in talent technology, and Monaghan emphasizes that Expedia approaches it with a preemptive, rather than purely reactive, strategy. “You’ve got to de-bias your training data before you actually train the model,” she said.
Beyond cleaning the data, Expedia audits its models continuously and keeps a human in the loop for final decisions. All experiments happen inside walled gardens until they’re ready for production, where monitoring remains intense.
This disciplined approach reflects a broader philosophy Monaghan calls “AI optimistic, but balanced by AI responsibility.” The company aims to harness AI’s speed and scale without allowing opaque algorithms to make high-stakes choices about people’s careers.
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Upcoming Webinars
May 28
We’re in a new frontier with AI, yet getting buy-in from leadership and the legal department on AI tools can often be a roadblock. Still, AI is already finding its place in modern hiring, from managing early-stage volume to supporting more structured and consistent interviews. In this session, panelists will explore how organizations build confidence in AI-driven solutions by starting with practical, controlled use cases, setting clear guardrails, and demonstrating real, measurable results. Where is AI delivering value, and where does human judgment remain essential? How do we protect the integrity of our process? How can we ensure fairness and maintain defensibility? How do we move faster without sacrificing quality? Panelists will explore these questions and more.
June 18
AI is changing work faster than most organizations can define, assess, and build the skills needed to use it well. This webinar moves beyond broad talk about “AI skills” to offer a practical framework for understanding where AI belongs, what people need to do with it, and how organizations can support safe, effective adoption. Drawing on HiBob’s research and its AI Skills Framework, the session covers AI readiness, individual AI usage, and organizational AI usage—spanning AI literacy, prompting, output evaluation, workflow redesign, automation, and governance.
June 23
Talent acquisition leaders are being asked to do more with less. Budgets are tightening as organizations respond to economic uncertainty and increasing investment in AI. At the same time, hiring teams need to improve efficiency while making sure new hires have the skills to succeed and create value for the business. This means looking beyond immediate role requirements and identifying people who can adapt as skill needs change over time. A skills-based hiring strategy is essential to making that happen. Join this session to learn what a skills-based hiring process looks like and how to identify the skills that predict success across roles and industries.
June 30
AI is often framed as a way to make HR more efficient. That framing misses what’s actually happening. As AI begins to absorb a significant share of operational work, the role of HR doesn’t just accelerate; it shifts. The function moves from processing requests to designing systems, managing human-AI collaboration, and building new capabilities that didn’t exist a few years ago. In this session, Jim Barnett, CEO and co-founder of Wisq, shares both a point of view and what we’re learning on the frontline of building agents. Drawing from real deployments, he'll walk through what actually changes when AI takes on HR work: cases resolved in minutes (not days), 24/7 policy guidance, and HR teams redeployed into more complex employee and labor relations work.
September 15
As AI reshapes recruiting and candidate fraud becomes more sophisticated, trust is emerging as one of the most valuable currencies in hiring. What are candidates most concerned about when it comes to AI in the hiring process, and how can employers respond? How has the rise of AI-generated resumes, assessments, and interview responses changed how employers evaluate talent? What practices ensure hiring remains fair and human-centered as automation expands? In this session, executive panelists will discuss how they are contributing to more transparent and credible hiring experiences, while ensuring confidence in candidate authenticity.
September 17
AI has fundamentally changed hiring for both candidates and recruiters, making the process faster but also more complex. As technology accelerates decision-making, organizations must focus on being truly prepared for AI, not just adopting it. Join our panel of HR and talent experts to learn how to navigate this shift. You'll discover: what AI readiness means and why it is critical for success, how organizations are combining technology, skills data, and people science for smarter decisions, the new capabilities talent acquisition teams need to hire and lead in an AI-enabled world, and strategies to build trust and transparency throughout the hiring process.
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