Can Recruiters Tell If You’ve Used AI To Write Your Resume?
You’re writing your resume and struggling to really capture the skills and tasks you’ve had in past roles. So, you upload your resume to ChatGPT and ask it to add more detail. What could go wrong?
While AI can be a helpful tool and a good starting point for crafting certain resume elements, it is no substitute for your own personal writing style. Below are tells that indicate to a recruiter that AI has been used in a manner that weakens your resume, examples of where Chat GPT, and how you can use AI to brainstorm and restructure your resume rather than write it.
Features of AI-Generated Resumes
While AI is skilled at formatting resumes, it is less skilled at fully capturing the nuances of language. Here are a few things that occur in AI-generated resumes that employers will catch and will harm your chances of hearing back if you adjust them.
Uniform, repetitive language
AI only knows what it has in its knowledge repository and may overuse trite phrases or repeat itself.
Example: When describing a student mentorship role, AI may state “Mentored students….” which does not tell the recruiter anything more than the job title
Generic Language & Lack of Personalization
AI may add skills and qualities that could be used in a wide number of fields without any strong context or clarity. It may sound more like a job description versus capture what someone actually did in their role.
Example: A description such as “possessing strong analytical and problem solving skills” or a bullet point for a role that says, “utilized multi-tasking and attention to detail,” without showing how that was actually expressed in that specific role.
Unnatural Sentence Structure
Language is complex – and as clever as AI is, it doesn’t fully understand how humans communicate. Strange sentences created by algorithms might be the clearest giveaway that AI wrote your resume. Watch out for disconnected phrases, ambiguous statements, overly formal language, illogical sentences, and redundancy.
Examples: “Increased sales and adept in Python,” “Fluent in English, Spanish, and JavaScript,” “Highly skilled in programming and have programming skills”
Resume Examples
We took one of our resumes for teachers, Ellen Education, and asked Chat GPT to improve the resume and the bullet points. Compare the two documents below:
Ellen Education Original Resume
What differences (aside from formatting) do you see between the two resumes? What’s been added or changed?
This marked-up version of Ellen Education’s resume shows additional content that’s been added out of nowhere (i.e.: It’s made up information or pulled it from something it had in it’s repository it thinks is similar), additional skills it’s added that the resume writer may not have used in that role, and some repetitive language. Note how many markings there are on this document and how AI could falsify data, skills, experiences. While it might be easy to get by with that in the resume review stage, it will become glaringly obvious in the interview stage if AI has made up information on your resume.
So what can you do? Edit! This final version of Ellen’s resume combines some of the structure and ideas of the AI resume with Ellen’s own experiences and expertise. She changed the data to include the results she actually saw, added some detail and experiences she overlooked, and changed the tone of the bullet points and objective to be in her own voice. This is one example of how you can utilize AI in crafting your resume.
Additional Resources
Using AI Tools in Career Exploration