A huge part of my day-to-day work is acting as an executive recruiter, and I have been screening resumes, interviewing, and hiring people for over 30 years. Over the last two years, one question keeps coming up more than almost any other."Hey Steve, should I use AI to help write my resume?"People are genuinely worried about this. They are not sure if using AI is cheating, if recruiters can tell, or if it will somehow count against them. So here is my answer.
That is it. As long as your resume is honest and accurate, as long as it is not filled with fake experiences, inflated titles, or skills you do not actually have, I do not care how it was written.If you used ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI tool to help you organize your experience, tighten your language, and present yourself clearly, that is fine. You are using a tool to do a better job of representing yourself. There is nothing wrong with that.
Here is the part that is the most funny to me. Some people get worked up about candidates using AI to help with their resumes, as if professional resume help is a brand new concept.In the 80s and 90s, there was an entire industry of professional resume writers. People paid good money to have someone else take their career history and turn it into a polished document. It was completely normal. Nobody accused you of being dishonest because you hired someone to write it for you.AI is doing the same thing. Faster, cheaper, and available to everyone instead of just the people who could afford a professional writer. If anything, it levels the playing field.
The problem is not using AI. The problem is using it lazily.If you paste your job history into a prompt, accept whatever comes back without reading it carefully, and submit a resume full of generic language and accomplishments you cannot actually speak to in an interview, that is going to hurt you. Not because you used AI, but because your resume is not really yours anymore. It is a template with your name on it.The candidates who get this right are the ones who use AI as a drafting partner, not a ghostwriter. They use it to clean up their language, catch gaps in how they are presenting their experience, and make sure their resume is structured well. Then they read every line, verify every claim, and make sure they can back up everything on the page in a live conversation.
Use every tool available to you. AI, spell check, grammar tools, a friend with good editing instincts, whatever helps you put your best foot forward. The goal is a resume that is clear, accurate, and presents your career honestly.Just do not copy and paste it blindly. Check it with your own eyes. Make sure it sounds like you. And do not lie.That was the rule in 1990 and it is the rule now. The tools changed. The standard did not.