Can Recruiters Tell When You Are Using AI?

So, you’re writing your resume and you’re having a hard time capturing the skills you developed and tasks you completed in your past roles, so you turn to AI or ChatGPT for help. While AI is a helpful tool and great starting point, it isn’t a replacement for writing your resume on your own. Sure, it’s been a game changer for unclogging writer’s block, creating a jumping off point, or generating an outline of the elements you want to cover, it’s however becoming easier and easier for recruiters to know when a candidate has used AI to craft their resume. 

Here are four tells that you used AI to craft your resume.

1. Repetitive Phrases

If you’ve used AI, you’ll notice that it can overuse phrases and repeat itself at times. It does this because AI only knows what it was trained on, so its bank of knowledge isn’t limitless. 

For example, AI might describe your role as a Customer Service Team Lead as “Led a team of customer service representatives.” When that’s just another way to state the job title.

2. A Lack of Personality

When listing your skills, you may notice that AI will include generic skills that a variety of roles in several fields use. Which is great, but when the AI doesn’t offer any context as to why they’re including a specific skill, your resume doesn’t stand out. Instead, it’s just listing something from the job requirements, rather than something you accomplished when you held that role. 

For example, AI might include a bullet point like “Possessed strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail.” But you personally know that you can make that statement stronger, by saying something like “Utilized strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail to uncover monthly savings for the corporation, that resulted in $200,000+ a year in savings.” That ability to add personality and context makes a big difference, right?

3. Awkward Sentence Structure

AI doesn’t always grasp the complexity of how humans communicate. Algorithms that create odd sentences are a dead giveaway of AI playing a part in the creation of your resume. You cannot just input something in the AI and copy and paste what it created for you. You need to review what was created and ensure that there aren’t unnatural sentence structures, lazy statements, the language isn’t too formal, and it isn’t redundant. 

For example, many have been seeing that AI is lumping languages together, but not in the way you’d think. “Fluent in Spanish, French, and JavaScript.” It doesn’t make sense to categorize JavaScript with the others.

4. Additional Content Added

If you ask AI to review your existing resume and have it match a job posting you’d like to tailor your resume to, be aware that the AI will likely add content out of nowhere. This can happen because it’s pulling information from its repository of information and simply beefing up your resume with information it thinks will help improve it, which is nice of it, but if it is irrelevant or inaccurate for you to include on your resume, is it actually helpful? 

So, while yes, using AI to craft your resume is valuable, it still needs input from you. It can’t be trusted 100% to accurately create a stellar resume. So, if you plan to use it, be sure you have a critical eye when reviewing its work.