Confident Storytellers Win Interviews. Evidence Should.

Grant Wyatt, the Melbourne-based HR executive and keynote speaker who wrote “The Great LinkedIn Performance” for TalentCulture, drops a small, telling admission halfway through his argument about personal branding. Wyatt writes that “every résumé now mirrors the job advertisement almost perfectly.” He calls it funny. It is not funny. It is the exact failure mode his article spends the rest of its length diagnosing on the LinkedIn feed, and it is already sitting inside the résumé, the document that sits at the center of every hiring decision.

Wyatt’s argument is that AI has made the appearance of expertise nearly free, so appearance is losing its value as a signal, and what he calls “personal proof” is the only thing left that separates people. He is right, and he is writing about a content feed. He does not extend the argument to the interview room, but he should. The interview room runs on the same mechanism, and most interviews are loosely structured enough to reward it.

From “Build Your Career” to “Build Your Personal Brand”

Wyatt traces a real shift in the advice professionals get: from build your career to build your personal brand, share your insights, find your niche, show up consistently. He does not dismiss this outright. Visibility matters, and choosing not to participate can feel like disappearing from the conversation. His complaint is narrower: AI has now handed the semblance of expertise to nearly anyone, so, in his words, “the ability to sound intelligent is no longer a meaningful differentiator.” Presentation and polish, he argues, have become abundant.

That is a fair diagnosis of a content feed. It is also, with almost no translation required, a fair diagnosis of a hiring process that scores how someone talks about their work rather than what they can show they actually did.

The Interview Rewards the Same Performance

Every signal Wyatt names on LinkedIn has a direct match in the interview room. A confident tone reads as competence, and a fluent story arc, here is the challenge, here is what I did, here is the result, reads as evidence, even when nobody asks what “I did” actually meant in practice. None of this is unreasonable for an interviewer to notice. It stops being proof of anything once producing it becomes cheap, and that is exactly what AI has made possible for almost everyone.

Confidence is not evidence. It has just been an efficient stand-in for it, right up until it became easy to fake.

Our read is that hiring has not caught up to the problem Wyatt is describing. Presentation and capability used to move together closely enough that a confident, well-organized answer was a reasonable proxy for someone who had actually done the work. Once presentation becomes inexpensive to produce, on a feed or in front of a panel, that assumption breaks. Most interview formats have not adjusted for that break; they still ask for a story and stop there.

Distrust Is the Wrong Fix

The obvious reaction is to grow suspicious of the confident, articulate candidate, to treat confidence itself as a red flag. That misreads Wyatt’s own argument. He is not against personal branding; he is against branding substituting for building. Penalizing a candidate for interviewing well would be the hiring equivalent of that same mistake. Communication skill is not the problem. Untested communication skill is. Ask yourself whether your recent hires were chosen because they could do the work, or because they could describe it well.

The fix is structure, not suspicion. Behavioral and evidence-based questions ask for specifics a rehearsed narrative cannot supply on demand. What exactly did you do? What did you decide when the plan stopped working, and who disagreed with you and why? What would you change if you did it again? A candidate can prepare a practiced story about a project well in advance. Producing convincing, consistent, specific answers to several follow-up questions about that same project, on the spot, is a materially harder task, and it is the task structured interviewing is built to require.

What AI Cannot Fake Is What Your Panel Should Be Testing

Wyatt names the things he thinks AI cannot manufacture: consistent judgment, trust built through delivering difficult outcomes under pressure, the confidence that comes from repeatedly producing results. That is a reasonable description of what a good interview is supposed to measure. The trouble is that most interviews never get there. They ask “tell me about a time,” take the smooth answer, and move on, mistaking a good story for the judgment it was meant to demonstrate.

Wyatt’s résumé detail says more about his own argument than the branding advice does. When everyone can produce a version of themselves that matches exactly what the reader wants to see, matching the target stops proving anything. The interview does not have to fail on the same terms as a LinkedIn feed. It only fails when a panel accepts a well told story instead of asking the follow-up question that would have tested it.

Original reporting: TalentCulture.