This Is Why Recruiters Hate AI-Written Resumes

Outsourcing the nauseating 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.

Push “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.

How Does AI Work To Create Resume Content?

Why do AI-generated resumes sound generic?

Because AI writing tools reflect patterns they’ve learnt from other content.

Co-director of Wharton Business School’s Generative AI Labs, Ethan Mollick, explains that the Generative AI writing tools like ChatGPT, Bard and Claude “are based on prediction, trying to predict what happens next.”

At first, LLMs were pretty average writers.

They’ve advanced in power incredibly quickly, which has made them more useful. They’re especially strong on general knowledge.

But using AI to write your resume is an area where its usefulness remains dubious.

Limitations of AI Tools For A Successful Job Search.

You can’t easily prompt an AI to effectively:

You know, the meaty stuff that makes your resume or cover letter worth reading for a recruiter or hiring manager.

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:

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.

Associate Professor in ICT Policy at Concordia University, Fenwick McKelvey points out that ubiquitous access to AI tools is a corporate strategy to lock in market share, as companies seek to justify massive valuations and billions of dollars being poured into AI models.

AI Writing Shortcuts Can Be Counterproductive.

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.

I get it, job hunt is tiring.

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.

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.

AI Resumes Annoy Recruiters And Don’t Convey AI Skills.

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:

When asked, between 20-60% of recruiters said they would consider immediately rejecting an application if they think it’s AI-generated.

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.

Wariness of AI’s involvement in the creation of important documents is growing, and with good reason.

A global study by Melbourne Business School involving over 32,000 workers found “complacent” use of AI is widespread:

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 Or Engaged

It can take time to land the right job.

Staying motivated and adaptable is critical to presenting the best version of yourself, and being ready to wow a prospective employer when you finally get your chance.

There’s some 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:

If you’re not intimately familiar with the case you’re making in the resumes and cover letters you submit across various roles, will you really be prepared to answer an employer’s questions when you get a callback or an interview?

After all, ‘enthusiasm for the opportunity’ and ‘curiosity about the job’ are two major green flags for hiring managers when interviewing candidates, LinkedIn research finds.

Avoid The AI Hype.

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 (CX), saw many companies bring operations back onshore.

A 2025 report on CX found that while 46% of Aussies are fine using digital self-service for simple issues, 77% prefer talking to a real person when they’ve got a complex problem.

A lack of genuine human warmth is why there’s a growing, instinctive aversion to AI-generated content.

The irony, of course, is that AI is directly reflecting the most popular writing conventions embraced by real humans, who wrote the stuff LLMs were trained on.

So-called hallmarks of AI writing, like the em dash, have been unfairly maligned — even though great writers use them all the time (wink wink).

Even before ‘AI slop’ (the sea of low quality AI-generated content flooding the interwebs), 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:

It takes work to produce clear and lively writing.

Coming up with ideas and authentic self-expression are both hard. And every quality resume requires a healthy dose of editing and agonising over word choices.

Using AI To Improve Your Resume Writing.

Despite the drawbacks of using AI to write your resume, it can be used to help offset your weaknesses and improve your writing.

Let’s say you’ve got a great example of how you transformed a business using data: You built a shared workspace with dashboards that drew in data generated by both the sales and marketing teams.

You also started a weekly catch-up with both functions, which helped them feel like they were on the same page. Both teams became more data-informed and energised, which saw sales rise 10%.

But you need to explain it succinctly.

You can share your example with AI and ask it to improve the clarity of your thinking.

You might say, ‘rewrite this to be more concise’ or ‘summarise this example in two sentences, rephrased in professional language.’

You can either manually refine the wording until it looks good, or give the AI more feedback until you achieve a stronger result.

Labouring over prompting is probably only a wise use of your time if you’re confident you can recognise what ‘good’ writing looks like.

If you don’t know when a piece of AI-generated writing has reached a high enough standard to help you get shortlisted, you’ll need some good old-fashioned human know-how.

You could get a trusted friend or colleague to look it over for you.

But ideally, you’d want someone with some professional writing experience or recruitment and personal branding knowledge to give you feedback.

Especially if it’s a senior-level role, where you need to impress.

If you truly want your resume to stand out, the reassurance of expert human oversight is hard to beat. Plus human resume writers are capable of original thought and true creativity.

Jody