AI-Written Resumes: Use a Discerning Eye, Hiring Managers Advise

Job seekers are turning to artificial intelligence as a tool in crafting their resumes and boosting their chances of catching the eye of a hiring manager or recruiter. They’re plugging in keywords matching the job description. They word their previous work experience to more closely align with the job they’re applying for.

So how does an HR professional sort through these padded resumes to find the employee that best fits their organization’s needs?

It pays to pay attention, said Kristin Pozen, practice leader and senior recruiter for Duffy Group Inc., a global recruitment firm headquartered in Phoenix.

She has served in a variety of HR roles, including as benefits manager for the Phoenix Suns basketball team, CHRO for First National Bank of Arizona and Nevada, and owner and CFO of The Kiosk Store. She also has been an independent contractor for the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, serving as an HR consultant and recruiter.

A less experienced recruiter, Pozen said, likely will move along an AI-created resume to the hiring manager who, upon doing a telephone interview, may find that the real-life candidate’s experience and skills don’t add up.

“AI is just a new version of what people have been paying for decades; resume-writing companies have been out there for years,” she pointed out. “The fact that they can get [resumes created] for free through ChatGPT makes it more accessible.”

An acceptable use of AI is to check for proper grammar, she noted. However, instructing ChatGPT to take your resume and mold it exactly to a job description is “cheating,” in Pozen’s estimation.

“It’s pretty apparent from a recruiter’s perspective,” she added, “because every single keyword shows up in this person’s resume.”

Vetting the Resume

Pozen offered some tips for discerning whether a resume is an authentic representation of the job seeker:

• Consider the use of keywords. Too many in the resume, she said, and “it seems like you’re reading the job description” rather than a true list of skills.
• Look for metrics. A good resume will contain some sort of metrics or key performance indicators for the candidate’s work. Without some sort of data, the resume looks “a little too generic, and that can be off-putting,” Pozen said. Use behavioral-based questions during the interview to dig deeper into what the candidate did and how they performed their role.
• Look for misalignment. Does the resume show job progression? “How did they get to that [vice president] level? They can’t be managing a team of 20 as an associate,” she said.
• Look for job “inflation.” “It’s not every day where someone is going to have [met] every single bullet [point]” in a job description, Pozen said. Often, AI “will inflate what their experience has been in terms of duties. We vet out their experience based on how their experience fits in their current organization.”

Don’t dismiss a candidate “if they don’t hit all the marks of the job description; maybe there’s something in there that shows they have transferrable skills,” she advised.

Pozen sees value in the wise use of AI to write resumes, such as to polish existing content.

“I have encouraged a family member to [use] it,” she said, by asking AI to rewrite and compare the person’s resumes and delete sections that need a rewrite. But choose AI’s suggestions judiciously.

“You don’t need to copy and paste the whole thing,” she told job seekers.