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You’ve been asked to submit a CV – a curriculum vitae by its posh name – which tells an employer all about you and your experience in a summarised form.
No two people have exactly the same CV so should you use AI to write one?
AI is a great tool to generate ideas but your employer will be looking for individuality… someone who stands out from the crowd… which means lifting an entire CV isn’t the greatest idea.
Yes! Employers can screen CVs to check them for keywords but they can often spot overly AI-generated content, finding it generic or inauthentic.
They can (and do) also run them through a free tool to check if they’ve been written by AI.
Many bosses will much prefer human-written applications that show personality, so using AI as a tool to enhance your own writing is best, not as a replacement.
There are some telltale signs that you’ve spent all of two minutes preparing your CV – and employers are going to expect a lot more than that!
Some giveaways that you’ve asked Gemini to write yours could include:
Long dashes: The ultimate sin. Long dashes (—), called em dashes, are a no-go as most people don’t naturally type them on phones or keyboards. Younger writers tend to use commas, full stops and short dashes (-).
Triplets: In AI, a triplet is a stylistic tic where AI habitually lists three adjectives, nouns or verbs using an Oxford comma. For example, ‘The report was balanced, authoritative, and comprehensive’. It could also be three linked pieces of information that belong together.
Over-the-top vocabulary: There are certain terms that questionable if found in a CV. These include ‘spearheaded’ as a human might write ‘led’ or ‘managed’. You should also watch out for grandiose metaphors like ‘tapestry’ or ‘landscape’.
Americanisms: Recruiters will be hot on your use of US spellings, which AI tends to prefer. We’re talking the likes of ‘optimization’, ‘center’ and ‘labor’.
Copy and pasted placeholders: When you process a request using AI, it can leave [Insert Metric Here] or [Company Name] for the user to fill in. It might say at the end, ‘I can do X, Y and Z if you like’. If you cut and paste the created document and either of those remain, you’re doomed.
The best advice is to write like you speak. If anything sounds unnatural when you read it back, it will certainly flag as inauthentic with an employer.
To make a CV sound genuinely human, get rid of empty adverbs and use real figures to demonstrate your achievements. Your CV should sound read like a real person explaining their real work, not a frequently-used template. Think of it this way, if an employer asked you a question during an interview, does your CV sound like your real-life answer?
It’s also a good idea to get someone to check your CV before you send it off!
