AI tools have quietly become part of almost every job search. Ask around and most people you know have run their resume through ChatGPT, Claude, or one of the dozens of AI resume builders at some point this year. Used well, that’s a genuine advantage. Used carelessly, it’s the fastest way to end up in the rejection pile without ever knowing why.

The tool isn’t the problem. How it gets used is. Here are ten mistakes worth avoiding before your resume goes anywhere near a recruiter or an applicant tracking system (ATS).

1. Pasting the AI’s first draft straight in

The single biggest tell of an AI-written resume is that nobody edited it. If you paste your work history in, type “improve this,” and send the output straight to an employer, both ATS keyword filters and experienced recruiters can usually spot it. Treat the AI’s output as a first draft, not a final one — read it out loud, cut anything that doesn’t sound like you, and rewrite the bits that feel generic.

2. Using vague, one-line prompts

“Write me a resume summary for a marketing role” will get you a bland, average result, because that’s all the AI has to work with. The output only gets specific when your prompt is. Give it your actual years of experience, the industry, your key skills, and real numbers from your work — the more detail you feed in, the less generic what comes out will sound.

3. Letting it invent achievements you can’t back up

AI tools are very good at producing confident, specific-sounding claims — “increased efficiency by 40%,” “led a team of 12” — even when you never gave them that number. If a claim on your resume isn’t something you can explain and defend in an interview, take it out. Getting caught inflating a detail you can’t back up does far more damage than a plainer, honest line ever would.

4. Leaning on AI buzzwords

AI models have their favourite words, and recruiters have started to notice: “spearheaded,” “orchestrated,” “championed,” “pioneered,” “results-driven,” “dynamic team player,” “passion for excellence.” One of these is fine. A resume full of them reads as generic rather than impressive, and it’s one of the fastest ways for a human reader to clock that a machine wrote most of it. Swap the buzzwords for plain language and real specifics.

5. Sending the exact same AI resume to every job

It’s tempting to generate one “perfect” AI resume and fire it at every listing you find. But a resume that isn’t tailored to the specific role and its keywords will consistently rank lower with ATS software and read as generic to a hiring manager. Ask the AI to help you adjust the emphasis and keywords for each application instead of reusing one static version.

6. Letting AI flatten your voice

Hand your career history to an AI tool and it will often come back more polished — and less like you. The quirks, the specific way you describe your own work, the personality that makes you memorable in an interview: all of that can get smoothed away in the edit. Keep your own phrasing where it’s already clear and specific, and only use AI to tighten the parts that were genuinely weak.

7. Ignoring what AI formatting does to ATS parsing

Some AI resume builders default to tables, columns, icons, or decorative fonts that look great to a human eye but confuse the software an ATS uses to read your resume. If a system can’t correctly parse your job titles, dates, or skills section, your application can be filtered out before anyone sees it. Stick to a clean, single-column, standard format — and check how it reads after copying it into a plain text file.

8. Not fact-checking what the AI “tidied up”

AI tools will sometimes “helpfully” adjust a date, a job title, or a skill while rewriting a section, and it’s easy to miss on a quick skim. Before you submit anything, check every date, title, employer name, and qualification against what you know is actually true. An accidental error here isn’t just embarrassing — it can look like deliberate dishonesty to an employer doing reference checks.

9. Skipping the human read-through

AI-written sections often share a rhythm — similar sentence lengths, similar structures, paragraph after paragraph. Read the whole resume start to finish as if you were the recruiter seeing it cold. If it feels repetitive or oddly uniform to you, it will feel that way to them too. Vary the sentence structure and cut anything that repeats an idea you’ve already made elsewhere.

10. Assuming AI already knows what this employer wants

A generic AI prompt doesn’t know the specific language a particular employer or industry uses, and neither does a resume it produces on its own. Paste the actual job description in and ask the AI to help you match your real experience to the specific skills and phrasing the ad uses. That one step does more for your chances than any amount of generic polishing.

The bottom line

Recruiters generally aren’t rejecting people for using AI — they’re rejecting resumes that are generic, unverified, or poorly matched to the role, which AI can produce just as easily as it can help avoid. Used as a drafting and editing assistant rather than an autopilot, AI can genuinely sharpen a resume. Used as a shortcut to skip the thinking, it usually does the opposite.

If you’re not sure whether a job ad’s AI-related jargon actually applies to you — or you just want a second pair of eyes while you write, meet Lilli B, our free AI Jargon Decoder. Paste in a job advert and Lilli B will identify every AI term and explain it in plain English, so you know exactly what to echo back in your resume. Upload the job advert instead and Lilli B can go a step further and rewrite your resume against it directly, applying everything covered above. And if you want to build real, practical AI skills rather than just talking about them on a resume, take a look at our free AI courses and resources.