Two of the three resumes my client received were 90% identical

One of our clients was hiring recently.

His talent acquisition team sent him three resumes for the role.

Two of them were 90% identical.

Both candidates had taken the job description, pasted it into AI and asked it to write a resume for that job. They wanted to get past the ATS.

I’m not against AI. I use it and I love it. It helps with brainstorming, research, writing, preparing and organizing your thinking.

In this story, those two candidates outsourced their thinking to it.

Instead of helping them stand out, it helped them look like everybody else.

AI is also a bit of a people pleaser. 👀

It’s guided by the questions you ask, and it tends to agree with you. It won’t challenge you the way a career coach might.

Ask it to improve your resume and it will improve your resume. Whether the resume was the problem in the first place never comes up.

Ask it for a networking message and you’ll get one, even if messages aren’t the biggest problem in your search.

If five interviews haven’t turned into an offer, AI can’t tell you why you’re losing ground.

AI can help you carry out a strategy. It can’t tell you whether you chose the right one.

If your assumptions are wrong, it can make you faster at solving the wrong problem.

So I’d ask a different question.

Instead of “Am I using AI?”, ask “Am I using AI to support the right strategy?”

A resume does need keywords. It also needs specific results that connect to the role you’re going after.

Those results come from you, because you’re the one who knows what you did and the impact you made 🙂