Your CV Is AI-Generated! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

So, you’ve discovered AI? Excellent. Apparently you no longer need to worry about writing your CV yourself. Just type in the job advert, tell the robot you’re a “results-driven professional” and within seconds you’ve got something that sounds absolutely fantastic.

And because everyone else has had exactly the same brilliant idea, you’re now in a very strong position to make your CV look exactly like everyone else’s. What could possibly go wrong?

LET AI DO THE WRITING!

Why spend an evening trying to explain what you actually did in your last job when a computer can do it for you in about twelve seconds? You can feed it your CV, the job advert, a few instructions and, if you’re feeling adventurous, perhaps ask it to “make me sound more senior”. Before you know it, you’ll have a beautifully written document containing words you’ve never used in your life.

That’s the clever bit. Recruiters love nothing more than reading the same phrases over and over again. “Strategic thinker”, “results-driven”, “excellent communicator”, “proven track record” and “passionate professional” are all absolutely essential if you want to blend into the crowd. And if the AI has managed to turn “answered customer emails” into “delivered exceptional stakeholder engagement”, even better.

PUT THE JOB ADVERT IN THERE!

Now this is where things get clever. Find the job advert, copy the whole thing into ChatGPT and ask it to make your CV match it. Every keyword, every responsibility, every little phrase the employer has used. Why bother deciding which bits actually relate to you when you can simply have the computer sprinkle the advert throughout your CV like Parmesan on a mediocre pasta?

Recruiters apparently want relevant CVs, so this must be the logical conclusion. If the advert says leadership, put leadership in. If it says stakeholder management, put stakeholder management in. If it says commercial awareness, put commercial awareness in. If it says experience of juggling several competing priorities, stick that in too. By the time you’ve finished, your CV will look remarkably suitable for the job. There is only one small problem. It might not actually tell them much about you.

Research from CV-Library found that 81% of recruiters believe CVs are becoming more standardised and less distinctive because of AI. Which is rather awkward when the whole point of a CV is to give someone a reason to remember you.

MAKE YOUR CV SOUND IMPRESSIVE!

This one is important. Never use a normal word when a much bigger one will do. You didn’t “help customers”, you “facilitated exceptional customer experiences”. You didn’t “organise meetings”, you “orchestrated high-level stakeholder engagements”. You didn’t “look after the accounts”, you “optimised strategic financial relationships”.

Nobody actually speaks like this, of course, but that’s hardly the point. The important thing is that it sounds professional.

And if you ask AI to make it “more polished”, “more executive” or “more impactful”, you’ll probably get another twenty words that you wouldn’t use in conversation with your own mother. Still, it looks good on paper. Presumably.

APPLY FOR EVERYTHING!

Now you’ve got your magnificent new AI-powered CV, you might as well put it to work.

There’s a job advertised for a Project Manager? Apply. Never managed a project? Doesn’t matter, AI has already found the transferable skills.

Marketing Manager? Go for it.

Operations Director? Why not?

Senior Finance Business Partner? You did once complete an expenses spreadsheet, didn’t you?

This is where the beauty of AI really comes into its own. It means you can tailor your CV to practically anything in minutes, which means you can send an awful lot more applications without having to spend quite so much time thinking about whether you actually want the job or have any realistic chance of getting it.

And you won’t even have to wonder whether this approach is working because you’ll have a lovely list of applications sitting in your job board account proving that you’ve been extremely busy.

SEND ANOTHER FIFTY!

Nothing happening yet? Excellent. Send more.

There must be a job out there somewhere. Perhaps the 47 applications you’ve already sent were unlucky. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Maybe the ATS ate your CV. Maybe LinkedIn is broken. Perhaps Mercury is in retrograde.

Whatever the reason, the obvious answer is to do exactly the same thing another fifty times.

The trouble is, more applications don’t necessarily solve a CV problem. If your CV is generic, adding another fifty applications just gives you fifty more opportunities to be ignored.

CV-Library’s research found that 35% of recruiters say they have missed out on strong candidates because of AI being used in recruitment, while 27% say strong applications have been filtered out before interview.

ANYWAY, BACK TO REALITY...

If you’ve made it this far, well done. You may have noticed that this wasn’t really an instruction manual.

The point isn’t that you shouldn’t use AI. Of course you can. If it helps you tidy up your CV, spot a spelling mistake, suggest a better way of explaining something or give you a starting point when you’re staring at a blank page, crack on.

The problem comes when everybody starts using it to produce the same polished, keyword-heavy CV full of phrases that could belong to absolutely anyone. Because once everyone sounds impressive, being impressive on paper becomes rather less impressive.

And that’s where your actual experience matters.

What did you achieve? What did you change? What did you deal with? What did you save, improve, build, manage, sell or fix? What makes you different from the other 126 people applying for the same job?

AI can help you explain those things.

It can’t magically give you them.

So by all means use the robot. Just don’t let the robot turn you into another candidate who sounds exactly like everyone else.

Anyhoo, if your CV currently contains enough “strategic synergies” to put a management consultant to sleep, perhaps it’s time for a rethink. And if you fancy letting somebody who has written a few thousand CVs have a look at it instead, you know where we are.