HireAce » People Don’t Distrust AI. They Distrust Being Judged by It.

AI is becoming part of everyday working life. But when the same technology is used to decide who gets an opportunity, confidence falls sharply. That distinction should shape how we build the future of hiring.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an ordinary part of work.

We use it to summarise documents, analyse data, draft communications, explore ideas and complete tasks more efficiently. For many professionals, AI is no longer an experiment. It is simply another tool they use to do their job.

But something changes when AI moves from helping us work to judging whether we should be allowed to work.

The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants’ Global Talent Trends 2026 study exposes that tension clearly. Based on responses from 11,000 finance and accountancy professionals across 160 countries, the research found that 52% regularly use AI technologies in their roles.

Yet 48% expressed concern about AI-driven recruitment, while the accompanying findings reported that 43% trusted the technology.

That is not a contradiction. It is an important distinction.

People do not necessarily distrust AI as a tool. They distrust what happens when an opaque system is given influence over a decision that could materially affect their career.

Hiring is not just another workflow

The argument for using AI in recruitment can sound compelling.

It can process more information, reduce administration, create greater consistency and help organisations manage growing application volumes. Used well, it can support a better hiring process for employers and candidates.

But hiring is not simply a workflow to be made faster.

It is a consequential human decision. It determines who receives an opportunity, who is rejected and, in many cases, whose potential is recognised at all.

Candidates therefore need more than an efficient process. They need to believe that the process is fair, that they have been understood and that the decision is based on relevant evidence.

The ACCA findings show where that trust begins to break down.

Twenty-nine per cent of respondents were concerned about the loss of human contact and the absence of human feedback. The same proportion worried that AI could discriminate against candidates based on information contained in their CVs.

A further 17% believed AI encourages applicants to game the recruitment process, while 13% were concerned about a lack of transparency in AI-related hiring decisions.

These are not four separate technology problems. They point to one underlying issue: candidates are being asked to trust decisions they cannot see, understand or meaningfully question.

This is not simply resistance to change

It would be easy to dismiss this as a generational issue that will disappear as younger, more digitally confident candidates enter the workforce.

The research does show a significant generational difference. Fifty-five per cent of Gen Z respondents expressed confidence in AI-enabled hiring, compared with 37% of millennials, 26% of Gen X and 35% of baby boomers.

But even among Gen Z, 37% still lacked confidence.

More importantly, concern was not limited to candidates at the beginning of their careers. More than half of board-level, senior executive and partner-level respondents lacked confidence in the use of AI for hiring. The figure was also above 50% across broader leadership and mid-level executive groups.

These are not people who are unfamiliar with technology or unaware of its commercial benefits. Many will be involved in approving, purchasing or overseeing the very systems being introduced.

Their concern should not be treated as an adoption problem to be solved with better marketing. It is a design challenge.

If people who understand the value of AI remain uncomfortable with its use in hiring, the answer is not simply to explain the technology more enthusiastically. The process itself needs to earn their trust.

“Human in the loop” is not enough

The standard reassurance is that a human remains in the loop.

That sounds comforting, but it can describe very different realities.

A recruiter may technically make the final decision while relying heavily on an unexplained score produced by a system. An interviewer may receive a recommendation without knowing which evidence shaped it. A hiring manager may approve a rejection generated earlier in the process without ever seeing the candidate’s underlying information.

In each case, a human is present. But is the decision meaningfully human-led?

Human oversight only has value when the person can:

see the evidence behind an AI-generated conclusion
understand how that conclusion was reached
challenge it when it appears incomplete or wrong
add relevant context the system may have missed
remain accountable for the eventual decision

Without those conditions, “human in the loop” risks becoming little more than a label applied to an automated process.

The more useful question is not whether a human appears somewhere in the workflow. It is whether AI is supporting human judgement or quietly substituting for it.

AI needs the right job in hiring

The debate about AI in recruitment is too often framed as a choice between automation and tradition.

That misses the more important question: what role should AI play?

There are parts of hiring where AI can add considerable value without taking ownership of the decision.

It can help a hiring team define the outcomes a person will need to deliver. It can create greater structure across interviews. It can identify when an important area has not been explored. It can capture and organise evidence from a conversation. It can highlight inconsistencies and potential sources of bias. It can make comparisons more disciplined and reduce the influence of memory, intuition and interview style.

These applications do not require AI to decide who should be hired.

They require it to help people gather better evidence and exercise better judgement.

That is a fundamentally different model from using AI to screen people out, conduct a one-way automated interview or produce an unexplained suitability score.

The distinction is between AI-led decision-making and AI-supported decision intelligence.

One asks people to trust the machine’s answer. The other gives people better information with which to reach their own answer.

From artificial intelligence to interview intelligence

This is where the idea of interview intelligence becomes important.

Most organisations do not suffer from a shortage of candidate information. They suffer from a shortage of consistent, relevant and decision-ready evidence.

Interviews regularly produce different questions for different candidates. Important areas go unexplored. Notes are incomplete. Interviewers remember the most polished answer or the person with whom they felt the strongest connection. Decisions are then made through a mixture of evidence, instinct and retrospective justification.

Removing AI from that process does not make it automatically fair or reliable. Human interviewers bring their own biases, inconsistencies and blind spots.

The opportunity is to use AI to make those human processes more visible and more disciplined.

Interview intelligence should help organisations:

define the evidence required before the interview begins
maintain structure without turning the conversation into a script
recognise missing or weak evidence while there is still time to explore it
connect conclusions back to what the candidate actually said
compare candidates against consistent, role-related outcomes
identify possible bias without pretending it can be eliminated entirely
preserve human accountability for the final decision

This does not remove the interviewer. It helps the interviewer perform the role more effectively.

It also gives candidates something many automated processes cannot: the opportunity to have a genuine conversation, explain the context behind their experience and be assessed on evidence rather than keywords alone.

Trust must be built into the process

Candidate trust cannot be repaired solely through a privacy notice or a sentence explaining that AI is being used.

Transparency matters, but transparency without meaningful control is not enough.

Organisations adopting AI in hiring should be able to answer some straightforward questions:

What exactly is the AI doing?
What information is it using?
Is it gathering evidence, interpreting evidence or making a decision?
Can a person understand and challenge its output?
Who remains accountable for the outcome?
What does the candidate experience as a result?

If those questions are difficult to answer, candidates are right to be cautious.

The organisations that earn trust will not necessarily be those using the least AI. They will be those that are clearest about its role, most deliberate about its limits and most committed to keeping consequential decisions genuinely human.

The future of hiring should be AI-centred and human-led

The ACCA research should not be interpreted as an argument against AI in recruitment.

It is a warning against using AI carelessly.

Professionals who already recognise the value of AI are telling employers that hiring feels different. They are comfortable using technology to support their work, but many remain uncomfortable being evaluated by systems that appear impersonal, potentially discriminatory or impossible to understand.

That concern is reasonable.

The answer is not to return to entirely manual hiring processes, with all the inconsistency and bias they already contain. Nor is it to automate more of the process and hope familiarity eventually produces acceptance.

The better path is to give AI the right responsibilities.

Let it organise information. Let it improve structure. Let it identify gaps, surface evidence and challenge inconsistency.

But let people conduct the conversation, interpret the context and remain accountable for the decision.

Because people do not necessarily distrust AI. They distrust being judged by something they cannot see, understand or challenge.

And if AI is going to improve hiring, that is the trust gap we need to close.

HireAce is an AI-centred, human-led interview intelligence platform. It helps hiring teams structure interviews, capture evidence in real time and make more informed, consistent and confident hiring decisions.

Source

Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, Global Talent Trends 2026, based on responses from 11,000 finance and accountancy professionals across 160 countries.

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