TIPS & MYTHS
Here’s what I’ve seen and concluded, so far, about AI for résumés.
• Employers will know that you used AI to write your résumé. They will know it because of obvious defects in your résumé. They will not look forward to working through the defects.
• Garbage in, garbage out. AI knows only what you think to tell it. AI will not ask you questions to clarify the information, as a good human résumé writer will do. Still less will it ask you questions to find information that you didn’t think to provide. (Still less will it spend two or three hours in the phone with you, digging for information, before it starts writing, as I do.)
• Garbage in, garbage out. It’s up to you to tell the AI program what to do: what sort of structure, emphasis, etc., you want. Do you actually know what to tell it? If you do, you’ve somehow acquired a knowledge of résumé issues that even many commercial résumé writers don’t possess.
• Informed opinion on AI résumés is that the raw results are quite poor. It’s possible to send the résumé back to the AI system with requests for revisions, but the requests, to be effective, have to be specific—and your ability to make the right requests is limited by your knowledge. You’ll have to spend some time thinking about them. Also, AI’s ability to interpret your requests will be as limited as it was the first time around.
To make the résumé that AI gives you into a presentable and effective résumé, you will need to spend a fair of time and effort to work it over completely. And it still will have problems unless you’re a skilled editor, in which case you could have written it yourself with much less trouble. Or you could hire an editor, who will probably want to ask you a number of questions in order to do the job right. And who might not know much about the special requirements of résumés.
Or, of course, you could hire a résumé writer to re-work your AI résumé. The AI résumé you hand him to work with won’t be any better than the résumés people handed him in the past, pre-AI. It may well be a lot worse. So don’t expect a discount. In fact, smart résumé writers may add a basket-case surcharge. Me, I’d probably ignore your AI résumé and start from scratch gathering information in the in-depth interview.
• In sum: AI really is pretty amazing. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a sample of AI-generated writing: A machine did that!!!! I was amazed, but not scared. As with Samuel Johnson’s dancing dog, what is amazing is not that it dances well—it doesn’t; it dances comically—but that it dances at all. It would not be a good partner at a ball.