This is from Jody McDonald at Arielle recruitment in Sydney. It neatly sums up the issue with AI written resumes. If you disengage your brain and let AI do the work for you, prepare for rejection and disappointment.
“Outsourcing the task of writing your resume to the robots sounds like a godsend. After all, you suck at writing about yourself.
You get excited, thinking it’ll be a five-minute job. You upload your job description and your old resume into ChatGPT. Give it a prompt and hit “Generate”.
Your new resume is stuffed with corporate platitudes and boilerplate statements.
By now you’re thinking – is using AI to write your resume a good idea? Probably not. Let me show you why.
AI creates boring resumes
Because AI writing tools reflect patterns they’ve learnt from other content.
But using AI to write your resume is highly dubious.
Let’s say you’re applying for a management role.
You can input your previous job titles and employment dates and give ChatGPT a list of keywords and skills mentioned in the job description, such as ‘applies data to make decisions’.
The tool will almost instantly produce text formatted in resume style, with a dot-point list of professional-sounding achievements under each role.
Here’s an example of the kind of achievement ChatGPT spits out:
“Applied data-driven insights to refine operational policies, resulting in measurable improvements in team compliance and engagement.”
It’s so vague, it’s meaningless. That sentence could literally apply to any candidate.
And given that everyone can use the same free tools, your bot-written resume could literally look almost identical to the resumes of other candidates.
Never use AI output as a final draft
Knowing AI’s limitations, you may be tempted to use the tools to refine – rather than generate.
For example, providing the AI tool with a long version of a previous resume and asking it to cut it down to a one-pager for a specific role.
But the tendency for AI to churn out waffle or make stuff up means you’ll still need to massage the results further with additional prompts, and/or verify and personalise every line.
Even the most current version of ChatGPT, GPT-5, hallucinates almost 5% of the time. And the longer you go back-and-forth with the AI assistant, the worse it can get – because the model “struggles to maintain context.”
More than half of jobseekers polled in a recent survey said they’d aborted a job application halfway through due to overly complicated or time-consuming requirements.
And if recruiters are using AI to screen resumes, why shouldn’t you be able to streamline your processes too?
But if you really care about landing a particular job, you can’t escape the need to spend time polishing your resume.
The danger of starting with AI is that you won’t bother, and submit something sub-par.
Which almost guarantees your resume will get ignored if the competition for a role is fierce.
Why AI resumes annoy recruiters
Another issue with using AI to write your resume is that most recruiters can spot them, and it’ll stop them in their tracks. For all the wrong reasons, because it’s harder to tell if you’re a real person with a genuine interest in the role and they don’t know if they can trust the details in your resume are accurate.
Up to 60% of recruiters said they would reject an application if they think it’s AI-generated.
Not only because AI resumes are indistinct and boring – but because it implies that you’re lazy.
Being able to effectively use AI is a great skill to add to your resume. But for writing your resume, recruiters see it as the wrong tool for the job.
That also casts doubt on your astuteness, problem-solving skills and digital literacy.
A global study by the Melbourne Business School involving over 32,000 workers, found “complacent” use of AI is widespread:
66% of respondents said they’d relied on AI output without evaluating it and 56% had made mistakes in their work due to AI. That creates financial and reputational risks for companies.
Deloitte Australia recently made headlines because of embarrassing AI-generated errors in a $440,000 report it created for government, including made-up references and quotes.
It will now issue a partial refund, and it’s credibility has taken a hit.
AI won’t keep you mentally sharp.
There’s evidence that a reliance on AI weakens your mental agility.
When MIT researchers tracked and compared the brain activity of ChatGPT power users and people who relied on brain power to write essays over four months, they found ChatGPT users underperformed, with worsening results over time. Their writing was less original and lower in quality. They felt less ‘ownership’ of the content and had trouble recalling what it said.
If you’re not intimately familiar with the written case you’re making, will you be prepared to answer an employer’s questions when you get an interview?
Don’t damage your career with AI rubbish
There’s a tendency to go all-in on systems designed to improve cost-efficiency, before we realise that you can’t cut out the human element and expect to keep humans happy.
We saw it with the widespread move to cheap, overseas call centres, and the use of automated robo-menus.
Customer pushback, and a better understanding of the profit-driving value of an empathetic customer experience, saw many companies bring operations back onshore.
The cycle is predictable – an initial wave of gung-ho adoption, followed by a correction to bring back the right level of human connection.
A lack of genuine human warmth is why there’s a growing, instinctive aversion to AI-generated content.
That brings us to the heart of the problem. Great writing has always been rare because authenticity is rare.
Even before ‘AI slop’ (the sea of low quality AI-generated content flooding the web), a lot of online writing was formulaic and shallow: articles, videos and posts produced quickly to satisfy search engine bots and sell you stuff.
Much of it is soulless and banal. And that’s what AI writing tools are helping you to regurgitate. But even before the internet, a lot of resumes were unclear and uninspired.
Jobseekers have always struggled to persuasively convey their achievements using proof and inject their personal brand into their job applications. It takes work to produce clear and lively writing.
Coming up with ideas and authentic self-expression are hard. And every quality resume requires a healthy dose of editing and agonising over word choice.
The reassurance of expert human oversight is hard to beat. Plus human resume writers are capable of original thought and true creativity.”