Using AI on Your CV Without Getting Caught
Recruiters can now spot an AI-written CV across a room, and they bin it. The problem is not that you used the tool. It is that you used it as a writer instead of an editor.
Ask a model to write your CV and it will produce something fluent, confident and immediately recognisable. Recruiters read hundreds of these a week now. The tell is not a specific word. It is that the document is perfectly smooth and says nothing only you could have said.
Which is a shame, because the tool is genuinely useful for this. It is just being pointed the wrong way round.
Draft, attack, rewrite, ship what survives
The order matters. You draft — badly, in your own words, with the real numbers and the real messy details. Then you hand it over to be attacked, not polished.
The useful prompt is not "improve this bullet". It is closer to: Here is a bullet from my CV. Ask me the three questions a sceptical hiring manager would ask to test whether it is true. Do not rewrite it.
You will get questions like: how large was the team, over what period, and what was the number before you started. Those questions are the actual work. Answering them is what turns "improved onboarding" into "cut new-hire ramp from six weeks to three across a twelve-person distributed team".
Then you rewrite it yourself, using your answers. The model never wrote a word that ships. It interrogated you until you wrote a better one.
Where it is safe to let it write
Decoding a job advert — pull out the stated musts, the implied ones, and the terms repeated most. Generating interview questions from a specific advert. Producing five variants of an outreach message so you can pick the one that sounds like you. First-pass structure for a cover note you will then rewrite.
In each case the output is an input to your work rather than the artefact you submit.
The three tells to strip out
Adjective stacking with no numbers — "dynamic, results-driven professional with a proven track record". Perfectly parallel bullets that all run to the same length and rhythm, which no human writes by accident. And claims with no scale attached: improved, enhanced, streamlined, leveraged, all floating free of any figure.
Read your CV out loud. Anything you would be embarrassed to say to a person's face in those words comes out.
Why this matters more than the tool
The interview is the enforcement mechanism. Every line on a CV is a promise to be able to talk about that thing for two minutes under questioning. AI will happily write you a document you cannot defend, and the gap shows up in the first conversation, in front of the person deciding.
Write what you can defend. Use the machine to find out whether you can.