Trust me, everyone is sick of looking at AI slop.
AI is fabulous, and I am not here to talk to you about how bad it is.
I love it and could not imagine life without it, to be honest.
At the minute, it is slowly becoming my best friend, my coach, my partner, and my doctor.
But you have to use it in the right and safe ways.
When it comes to AI slop in writing, people are getting really fed up.
It is getting to the point where on LinkedIn, you can actually report a post as AI slop, which is crazy.
If you are a recruiter or a hiring manager, you are constantly trying to find out who is different and who will stand out.
When your CV is flooded with that kind of stuff, it is going to cause problems for you.
I have seen a lot of CVs in my time, and recently, many have so much AI in them that I want to vomit.
This newsletter covers the most common AI giveaways you can see in a CV and how you need to take them out.
The Bio Section
Let us get started with the bio, which is the very first section of your CV.
A lot of people write their CV, ask an AI tool to write a bio, and paste it right at the top.
That is the first thing a hiring manager or a recruiter sees.
Trust me, they are sick of looking at the exact same sentences.
Unless prompted otherwise, AI bios always contain phrases like “results driven, dynamic professional”…”proven track record…”. “Skilled in…”
That exact format is used consistently by AI to write a summary.
The moment a recruiter reads “results driven, dynamic professional”, they snooze.
They know they are reading AI slop and immediately become disinterested.
If your bio contains any of those phrases, you need to go in and change it.
The Work Experience Section
There are plenty of ways AI can pull the information you give it and structure it into new sentences.
However, you end up losing your uniqueness.
First of all, AI tries to throw far too many things into one structured sentence.
It starts with what you did, then how you did it, and the results for all your bullet points.
If you take a step back and read that, it is quite overwhelming and a lot of information for a human brain to absorb.
Do not get it to use that structure for every single element because it is actually jarring to read.
The next issue is bullet points that start with words we never use in our everyday language.
My favourite has to be “spearheaded”.
In the UK, I have literally never spearheaded anything in my life.
I just think of a person with a spear, standing up like an idiot in the middle of an office.
It is a very US term that works well over there, but we do not say it here in the UK and Ireland.
Take “spearheaded” out, and take “architected” out.
Who on earth has architected anything in their lives?
“Directed” is another one, as it is very rare that people use that in natural language.
Look out for those first words because honestly, a lot of them are nonsense and make people roll their eyes.
The Common Giveaways
Finally, we are going to cover the common giveaways that continue to bore me when I see a CV.
First of all is US spelling when you are not based in the US.
That is really frustrating and an instant AI giveaway.
It is not hard to run your text through a UK spell checker.
If I see “analyse” or “organisational” written with a Z, I kind of want to vomit.
Next is that really long punctuation line that AI writes quite a lot. (em dashes)
I do not even know how to type them on a keyboard, and they are completely overused now.
Take those long lines out of your sentence structure entirely.
The final one is all about bold words.
AI tends to put certain words in bold to attract the attention of recruiters.
It is a massive giveaway and it does not really work.
A lot of people think it draws the eyes to the keywords, but you actually lose the context when a human reads it.
It feels like I am being shouted at when I see that bold text, and that is not a nice feeling to have.
Let’s Fix Your CV
Listen, writing a CV can be a really challenging thing.
I could give you all the direction about AI slop and how to exclude it.
But the thing that is always hardest for people is getting that information out of your mind.
Putting it into a CV so that it helps qualify your experience is exactly what I do.
My real gift is getting that information out of your head and making sure you have a good CV to work with.
Good luck with your job searches this week, and if you’d like to learn how I can help you further, Book a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation with me and tell me your story.
I’d love to take out your AI slop and tell a story that represents you.