How to use AI to strengthen your resume

Toni Frana, Career Expert at Zety.com 

Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, among others, can be useful for optimizing your resume and other job search materials. These tools can help you be faster and more efficient, thus, less overwhelmed with the job search process that is lasting many people several months. However, employers are seeing an influx of generic, AI written applications, and that is not what you want. Instead, you want to use these tools to enhance your efforts and strategy, but not replace them. This requires practice with using the tools and creating applications that ultimately give you an advantage, instead of being forgettable and generic because you leaned into an AI tool. 

Why AI Is So Appealing to College Students and New Grads 

Entering the ‘real world’ brings its own sense of stress and overwhelm. Often, new grads feel they do not have enough experience to land a job. They also may feel stuck on how to phrase accomplishments and results on a resume. Of course, writing a resume in general can feel intimidating, and with so much information out there about what is correct and what is incorrect, it can create even more uncertainty for young professionals. 

This is where AI tools can be beneficial. For brainstorming purposes alone, AI tools can relieve any writer’s block to just getting started composing a resume. In addition, these tools can help provide the write structure and balance of text and white space on your document. A tool such as ChatGPT can suggest action verbs, ideas on how to write about accomplishments, and can also write with a professional tone in mind. In addition, AI can help brainstorm ideas around relevant and transferable skills in lieu of experience for many roles. 

What AI Is GREAT For in a Job Search 

As noted above, AI tools can help improve your job search efforts. Here are a few ways these tools can be beneficial: 

1. Brainstorming Experience and Skills

You can use AI tools to ask specific questions about your skills and experience. For example, asking “What transferable skills can I highlight from working retail” will give you some insight into skills that you likely used in a retail role that can be transferable to roles in your field of study. You also can ask more descriptive questions such as: “How can I describe leadership from a student organization (even being more specific with details about the organization is helpful). When taking time to use AI to brainstorm, you’ll be able to identify: 

• Transferable skills
• Impactful phrasing ideas 
• Uncover strengths and skills otherwise overlooked. 

Overall, using these tools to uncover your potential blindspots, give you ideas for phrasing, keep in mind, your outputs should always be fact-checked and rewritten to match your own voice.

2. Strengthening Bullet Points

Improving phrasing, action verbs used, and overall bullet points on a resume is critical for any job seeker as the resume is often the first thing a potential employer sees. They want to know how you can make an impact in the role at the company. Your resume is the document used to communicate this information, often though, the information reads more like a task list instead of accomplishments. 

For example, if you say: “Responsible for social media” that doesn’t give the employer a lot of information. It isn’t clear what is meant by social media, the social media channels used, or any metrics whatsoever of success. But, if you aren’t sure how you can improve that information, here is where AI may be valuable. You can ask it to help you specify in results the social media work you did. You should share what tools you used, the type of posts you created, the metrics, and any other detailed information and then ask it to help you write a bullet that is action and result oriented. 

From  your inputs to AI, you will get a few ideas, and can then decide which is most reflective of what you did, and then re-work the bullet suggestion into your own words. Starting with “Responsible for social media” may end up as: “Managed Instagram and TikTok accounts, increasing engagement by X% over X months.” 

Using data is incredibly helpful and impactful, and employers love seeing it. As AI helps you find ways to incorporate data into your bullets, make sure your end bullet is reflective of your actual results and outcomes and not inflated. 

3. Tailoring to a Job Description

Finally, once you’ve written your resume, since most companies use ATS, you need to tailor it to each job that you apply for. Based on insights from Zety’s resume template library, applicants increasingly favor customization, and AI can really help when you work through this step of the job application process. You can take a job posting and add that to AI, then include content from your resume and ask AI to compare your resume to the job description, looking for missing keywords and skills. Then, you can ask if AI can assist with aligning your resume to the job description. 

Keep in mind, this is not supposed to create a new resume that AI generates. It is also not supposed to make your resume such that it is ‘stuffed’ with keywords. The idea is to have thoughtful alignment and the tool should help you find ways you can write your resume so it is more relevant to the role you are applying for, thus helping hiring teams know you would be a great fit for the job. 

How AI Can Hurt Your Job Search

While AI can provide improvements in your job search, using it incorrectly can work against your efforts. Some examples: 

1. Generic Language

Hiring teams and recruiters know when a resume they are reading has been created using AI. Some key clues of this include:

• Overly polished, vague summaries
• Resumes with a lot of buzzwords
• High similarities across many applicant resumes

Applicants who use AI and don’t change the phrasing or suggestions can create many similarities between dozens of candidates, causing qualified candidates to disappear into the large group of applicants. 

2. Losing Your Voice

AI doesn’t actually know anything about you. It’s true some tools will start to get an idea of your tone of voice, but this isn’t an interpersonal relationship where someone knows your personality, understands what motivates you and knows your tone of voice. 

Writing cover letters, personal statements, and networking messages only using AI with no edits on your end only ensures you lose your true voice and won’t help you reach your end goal any faster. Focus on using AI tools for structural changes and brainstorming, then focus on those new ideas to rewrite what’s required in your own words. 

3. Inaccuracies and Fabrication

While these tools are helpful, AI also assumes certain outcomes. These tools will suggest metrics and could overstate your impact. Keep this in mind as you are tweaking your resume to apply for jobs. If anything you include is inaccurate, or you cannot confidently explain in an interview, it shouldn’t be included on your resume. 

4. Overdependence

Yes, you should use AI to help further your efforts in writing your resume and throughout your job search. However, relying on AI tools to do all the thinking for you could lead to an overdependence on using the tools. This can impact your ability to accurately communicate your value which can impact how you interview. It can lead to a lack of confidence in your own career accomplishments instead of enhancing what you already know about yourself. 

How to Strike the Right Balance

To avoid overdependence, consider drafting your resume, cover letters, etc. on your own first. Then, use an AI tool to offer suggestions on clarity, relevancy, and strength to the job description. Review those ideas, and then edit your draft to make some enhancements while keeping your voice and accuracy. 

AI can certainly speed up your job search, help you think more strategically, and also reduce some of the stress associated with resume writing and job searching. However, your experience, perspective and voice are ultimately what makes you hireable. Learning how to communicate your value with or without using an AI tool is an important career skill you start building as soon as you start your professional journey.