Before throwing a résumé draft into ChatGPT or asking another AI tool to craft a message to hiring managers, job seekers should avoid a few things.
“I never used the wording ChatGPT spit out, but I definitely used it to figure out where I was lacking in useful information and where I had too much,” one person said in response to a Business Insider poll asking how job seekers are using AI. Another person said they used it to create thank-you messages that draw on information from the company’s website, like the employer’s values. Another use was comparing résumés to job descriptions.
In the US alone, over 7 million people are unemployed, and about a quarter have been actively seeking work for at least 27 weeks. “This is a moment to sort of adjust the playbook a little bit,” said Pat Whelan, head of careers products at LinkedIn. “That’s where AI can be a huge help.”
Still, he added, AI tools should be just a starting point in the job search process. Below are six examples of AI mistakes and overuse to avoid so you don’t sabotage your chances.
Don’t give tech full control and lose the human touch
It’s the human, not the AI, who ultimately needs to sign on the dotted line of a job offer and take on the new gig’s duties.
Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, finds that AI can help job seekers enhance their applications. However, she cautions against offloading all the responsibility for creating materials to AI; the job seeker should still personalize materials to tell their story.
“Use AI as a collaborator,” Rathod said. “You potentially write your résumé out, and then you use AI to tweak it, strengthen it, make your existing bullets clearer.”
Meg Martin, a résumé writer and career coach, suggested avoiding telling the AI tool, “Here’s a job description. Write me a résumé for this job that I want to apply to,” without also talking about who you are and the experience that fits with what the employer is looking for. Without the personal spin, she said it’s just a generic résumé that won’t get far. If you want to use AI to help draft a résumé, Martin said to feed it written passages so it can match your voice.
Don’t forget to fact-check
Before uploading your résumé to a job application, give it a look over to make sure the skills, experience, and any other AI-enhanced sections are actually about you.
This is important if you reach the interview stage. “If you can’t speak confidently to every single bullet point on that résumé, that will hurt you in the interviewing process,” said career coach Lee Ann Chan.
Rathod emphasized that employers are looking for cohesiveness throughout the process, so a cover letter or résumé made with the help of AI should be consistent with what you can elaborate on in the interview stage.
“AI sometimes exaggerates qualifications and hallucinates job responsibilities and doesn’t have the timelines correct,” Rathod said. “So you want to make sure that you are thoroughly reviewing whatever output AI creates for you.”
Don’t just use whatever style or sentence structure it gives you
“The overarching line that I share with folks is there’s no such thing as an AI résumé or a non-AI résumé,” said Sam Wright, head of career strategy at AI résumé builder Huntr.co, and who also does one-on-one job search support. “It’s a good résumé, or it’s a bad résumé.”
Wright said that recruiters spend an average of just under 10 seconds on a résumé. If there are clear signs it’s an AI-written résumé, “then it’s probably going to be a bad résumé because what we’re ultimately catering towards is the preferences and biases” of the person making job candidate decisions, he said. Wright said some signs of AI usage can be em dashes or contrasting language of “It’s not X, it’s Y.”
He said the main mistake AI-using job seekers make is thinking that these tools mean they can focus less attention and effort. Job seekers should research what should be included. “If you are not an expert or you don’t know what is a good résumé to begin with, then using these AI tools, it’s not going to really help you make a better résumé because you’re already defaulting to what you already know and are prompting based off of that.”
Wright also said some AI users make the mistake of copy-pasting part of their conversation with the tool into their job application materials, so don’t forget to double-check.
Don’t be broad in your input to AI tools
Martin said garbage in equals garbage out, so job seekers should use detailed and strategic prompts to try to get useful output.
“If you give it a one-line prompt, you’re going to get something very generic and different than if you give it all the details about your background, about your experience, about what you’re looking for, how you see yourself fitting into the target job,” she said.
Career experts tend to advise making résumé details quantifiable. Chan said give AI tools some numbers and specifics about your work experience instead of simply uploading a résumé and telling it to tweak it to match the description.
“Tell them exactly, ‘when I was working on this group project, I leveraged these resources, I worked with these people, I was able to get 20% increase,'” Chan gave as an example.
After that, be clear on what you want AI to do with that data, such as creating a specific bullet point on a résumé that leverages the information. Also, let it know how long the point should be.
Avoid overusing generic buzzwords in résumés, cover letters, and even networking
One common part of the résumé is the professional summary at the top, which briefly explains the job seeker and their measurable achievements. Martin finds that AI tools tend to jam-pack the section with buzzwords or commonly used verbs.
“After a while, they all start to sound the same, and you’ve got to find ways to make yourself stand out,” Martin said, adding that the key is to edit.
For cover letters, she said people should guide the tool on their writing style and word choices to avoid it coming up with something more generic. “They usually start out with, ‘I’m excited to apply for such and such job,’ and that’s a dead giveaway,” she said. However, she said it should still feel human, so people could use the AI tool’s outputs as a guide instead of the final result.
Chan said candidates need to include numbers and demonstrate impact in their cover letters. She said common phrases that are used too often are “translated data into actionable insights, proven track record, results-oriented professionals.”
“It’s not that you can’t use those words, but you need to back it up with the results,” Chan said.
Don’t make cold, overused outreach messages
AI tools can also help with networking. Whelan said AI can save time when drafting messages, but job seekers still need to review and personalize them.
“Make sure you’re communicating why you have some unique fit with that particular role so that you stand out to recruiters,” he said.
Chan said hiring managers get messages all the time from people who say they see they work for a certain company and would like to ask a few questions. She said, instead of telling AI you are going to or have already applied for a job and now want to write a short message to the hiring manager, tell the tool some specific details about the person, for example, that the hiring manager recently spoke at a certain event, or something that can help make the message less generic.
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