Over the past few years there has been an obvious increase in the number of people who are using AI tools to write their resumes. Most of my clients send me a resume to use as a starting point for a rewrite, and I have become fairly adept at identifying when a resumes was built with AI.

My accuracy isn’t quite 100%. When I see a resume with spelling or grammar issues I can be sure it isn’t an AI job, but those aren’t the only tells.

Common Traits of the AI Resume

Some AI resumes lead off with a summary that provides my first clue. The AI summary is usually dense with cliches and keywords, and the volume of keywords can feel like overkill and a bit forced. Because resumes are written in an odd language structure and voice (AKA “implied first person”), there may be some clumsy passages or phrases that feel just a little off to a trained reader.

The major giveaway usually happens in the bullets of the experience section. The bullets are often formulaic and strictly follow a pattern of “I did X, resulting in Y”, with X as the action taken and Y as the quantified impact of that action. There is nothing wrong with that formula per se, and there are countless articles that recommend this technique. When it’s repeated without any variation, it can sound robotic.

What Is Missing?

The primary weakness in virtually all AI resumes I have seen is a lack of narrative/storytelling and missing context that a reader may need to truly appreciate the accomplishments being described.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you are an Operations Manager at DaveCo. Your AI resume contains perhaps five or six bullets detailing the steps you took to streamline and improve DaveCo’s operations, and each bullet uses the formula mentioned above to describe what you did and the impact on some metric. So the resume may look something like this:

Operations Manager, DaveCo 2022 - present

Did X, resulting in Y.
Did X, resulting in Y.
You get the picture…

Sounds good so far. So what is the problem?

Perhaps the reader has never even heard of DaveCo. Is DaveCo a Fortune 100 or a ten-person startup working from a garage? Can the reader truly appreciate your accomplishments without knowing this detail? Probably not.

What was the situation when you were hired at DaveCo? Were you hired as the company was pursuing critical funding that hinged on your success in reducing spend and enhancing efficiency? Were you hired specifically to achieve a specific savings target?

Did the C-suite of your prior employer all leave to form DaveCo? Were you recruited by a former boss, which can demonstrate that your past success makes you trusted by your peers?

Was DaveCo an established company run by an old guard that was resistant to change? Did you have to influence ownership/leadership to get their buy-in? This ability to influence others is an important skill to have, but can be difficult to articulate on a resume.

These are just a few examples of details often overlooked that help readers to understand your value.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The question then becomes “Is the lack of context and storytelling an issue inherent with AI tools, or is this more a user issue due to prompts?”. Based on my current understanding, I believe it’s probably a bit of both.

Job seekers may use a vast collection of articles about resume writing to inform their strategy, and they may also borrow ideas from sample resumes posted online. These same articles and sample resumes are used to train AI tools.

If the published articles about resume writing do not emphasize the importance of context and storytelling, and the sample resumes do not tell a story, the AI tools will reflect that gap.

As a bit of research for this article, I reviewed some samples of AI-generated resumes from companies providing these services. I found only a couple that provided context about employers, and I didn’t find any that truly told a story. The fact that these companies are building AI tools specifically for writing resumes, and their tools fail to provide necessary storyline, is surprising.

The Bottom Line

A person with a deep understanding of both resume writing and AI prompting techniques could leverage AI to build a quality resume undetectable to even a well-trained eye. I was honestly a bit shocked by the poor quality of the samples provided by AI resume companies, as one would assume that they employ staff with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce a great resume.

If they can’t write a solid resume using AI tools, can you?