Are AI Resume Writers Any Good?

I tried an AI Resume writer and here is my honest opinion.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very popular across many industries, especially in the creative sector. I was introduced to a few AI art generators that I played around with. The results were outstanding but nothing ever quite hit the exact look I was going for. 

Chatbots are another huge one that has been saturating the news lately. The goal is to make text interactions for customers feel like you’re talking to an actual person. It’s getting harder and harder to differentiate whether you’ve got a human or a robot on the other end of your customer inquiry text.

I have what looks like a chatbot on my website but it’s not ("Chat with us" is NOT a chatbot). 

This is a notification system. If I’m available, I respond right away. If not, I reach out as soon as humanly possible because, well, I’m a human and not a chatbot. 

Back to the point at hand. 

I was recently asked how business is going with the meteoric rise of AI writing becoming available, especially for resume writing. 

This sparked an idea. I decided to give an AI resume writer a try to see how it compares to my writing, as someone who has been doing this for over 10 years. 

Read on to discover my experience, opinion, and recommendations.

Getting Signed Up

The AI resume writer I chose to use required a login. A login makes sense so you may save your work and have it sent to you via e-mail. Plus, it allows access to the free basics. 

For this particular writer, the basics include your contact information, an experience section, any projects or volunteer work, education, certifications, coursework, involvement or affiliations, skills, and summary. 

When all is said and done, you’ll have all the required sections of a resume, plus a few more. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. White space is important on a resume, and it is possible to include too much information.

Contact Information

Once you’re signed up, you begin on a screen for your contact information. This section is straightforward. You fill it in just like any other information form you’ve come across.

One minor annoyance is the manual save. You MUST hit the save button or you lose everything if you move to the next tab without saving. Again, minor annoyance, not a deal breaker.

Experience

Experience is going to be the meat and potatoes of your resume. This is where a lot of the hard work for a resume writer comes in as crafting achievement-based bullet points that are riveting is no easy feat. 

While this is difficult to admit, the AI writer does a pretty decent job of coming up with bullet points.

For example, I started my bullet point with nothing more than “I write resumes.”

This is what AI created from that simple sentence: 

DISCLAIMER: These are not my quantifications. This bullet point was completely AI-generated.

Okay, so not bad AI. Not bad at all. 

While the AI writer did a good job, there is still a lot of work to be done by the human writer, aka you. AI needs something to work from, so you will be creating the initial bullet points anyway. 

If you look to the left of the screenshot, you’ll notice optimization suggestions. It’s not perfect. This system states you have 0 quantified bullet points and even tells you which ones to review. Bullet point number two is definitely quantified.

There are more optimization ideas, but they are paywalled. These include checking for personal pronouns, buzz words, passive voice, filler words, and useful content. ß These are all VERY important pieces to be checking for in each bullet point. With the free version, it’s up to you to find these errors.

Another thing to consider is this bullet point created by AI is two sentences and wordy. I would recommend editing it down some and breaking it into two bullet points.

All in all, it would be a good place to get started on building out your bullet points to make them more effective but it leaves some work to do.

Project

After experience comes a project section.

As you might have noticed, there is a video explaining each section in the upper left hand corner of the screen. While somewhat helpful, I found this section to be a little vague on what they were looking for as ‘project’ could mean many different things to different people.

I chose to include my guest podcasting experience. I must say, AI didn’t do a great job of generating a description this time. They were pretty far off base, but did give a good foundation to improve upon.

Summary

I am skipping the next few sections as they are pretty self-explanatory and mostly filling out information instead of building content.

On to the summary. The summary is the very first thing a hiring manager is going to read after your name. It’s the hook of your resume. It’s what is going to get them to keep reading. I can make plenty of great arguments as to why this is one of the most important pieces of information on your resume. 

If I were giving grades for each section to this AI resume writer, I would give the summary section a solid D. It’s not great. It follows a very formulaic method that isn’t exciting to read and fails to bring in keywords from the job description (which it has because one of the very first things you do is post your target job description).

No matter how many times I generated an AI summary, it always ended with an objective statement. An objective statement isn’t necessary unless you are changing career paths or returning to the workforce. And even then, that’s not a hard and fast rule.

Here is the 4th generation I received:

Key Takeaways

1.     The AI resume writer isn’t awful, but it’s not great either. I would call it just okay.

2.     The AI I used sets you up for a good backbone of what you need for an effective resume.

3.     I would recommend this to someone who is either just graduating or early career, but definitely not any further than that. If you’re mid-level and beyond, you’re probably safest to do it yourself or hire a human writer versus working with AI writing. You’ll be doing most of the work anyway. It was time-consuming just to try it out.

Final Thoughts

I was underwhelmed with the final draft that was generated.

I think an AI writer would be really good to help get over blank page anxiety and would be great to get your resume started.  At the end of the day, you’ll be doing almost all the work with maybe a little more sprinkled in as you’ll have extra editing to do. 

I say either do it yourself in Word or hire a professional. 

Need a human to write your resume and not AI? 

#resumewriting #resumehelp #ai #chatgpt

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