What about AI?

[00:00 - 00:09] So this is the elephant in the room, right? If AI is being used, screen CVs, why shouldn't AI be used to write CVs?

[00:10 - 00:27] Now there's a lot of issues with using AI to write CVs and I hope they are mostly obvious. The big one is that it is very difficult to give any AI tool the context of your experience, right?

[00:28 - 00:39] Sure, you can feed it, your past CVs, you can feed it, your LinkedIn profile, whatever. But ultimately this tool is not going to have your lived experience.

[00:40 - 00:53] It's not capable of subjectively understanding the trajectory of your career. It's very good at generating keywords and that writing copy that sounds very good.

[00:54 - 01:14] And that where it's true would be ideal for the role. And of course, some obviously AI generated CV might stand against you, but because CVs are very formalized, detection chances aren't that high, I would say.

[01:15 - 01:24] Order is gonna be so many false positives that it's not a useful tool. Different for a cover letter, I would not recommend using AI to write your cover letter, maybe for templating.

[01:25 - 01:37] So yeah, just straight up writing your CV with AI and sending it off is not a good idea. It's not going to have your context, but it is very good for reviewing and templating.

[01:38 - 01:50] As I said, it's very good at matching keywords and LLMs when they're generating a CV, they are aware of a lot of the fundamentals I'm talking about, right? They'll generally be good about using action verbs.

[01:51 - 02:19] For example, using strong words, they're good about avoiding the passive voice, they're good about sticking to word count, for example, if you want to have a specific word count. And there's also specific AI review tools, some of them are free online or you get like a free trial for a couple of days where you can pop in your CV and get it scored in a way that potentially resembles how an ATS system is going to store you.

[02:20 - 02:40] I tested out a couple of them before giving my judgment. And one thing I found is that they were very useful for identifying sections of the CV that worked too long, right? If you had a bit too much text or if you had a run on sentence or something, they were very good at identifying a lack of active voice, strong verbs, typos, all of this.

[02:41 - 02:55] And obviously it's very good at noticing missing keywords if you also provide a job description. That said, when it came time to suggest things to improve it, it wasn't that strong.

[02:56 - 03:05] It was giving some examples that would be good on paper, but that had absolutely nothing to do with my experience. So it's much better at diagnosing issues than fixing them.

[03:06 - 03:21] And a lot of these tools can also give you scores, not just overall on how much you match a job description, but on brevity, density, structure, things like this. So it's definitely worth checking out these tools.

[03:22 - 03:30] And definitely if it tells you there's an issue, do take it somewhat seriously, but be very careful about the suggestions you use.