How to Use AI to Update Your Resume Without Making It Sound Generic

AI can be useful when you're updating a resume, but handing over the entire document and asking it to "make it better" gives the tool very little information about what actually makes you a strong candidate.

AI doesn't know which parts of your career matter, what you accomplished, how your responsibilities changed, or which experiences distinguish you from someone else with the same job title. When you provide limited information and ask it to write for you, you're much more likely to get polished language than useful specificity.

I recommend using AI to help you examine your experience before you ask it to write anything.

Start with the jobs you're targeting

Find three to five job descriptions that represent the type of position you want to pursue. They don't all need to be positions you're planning to apply for because the goal is to identify patterns across similar roles.

Ask AI to compare them and identify recurring skills, experience, responsibilities, technologies, and terminology. You're not asking it to decide whether you're qualified; you're using it to organize information that would otherwise require you to compare several job descriptions manually.

Once you understand what employers consistently seem to be looking for, you have something useful to compare against your own experience.

Work through your experience one position at a time

Instead of uploading your entire resume and requesting a rewrite, give AI the information you currently have about one position along with the patterns you've already identified from your target roles.

Then ask it what additional questions it would need to ask you to better demonstrate your experience for those positions.

This process can surface a project you'd forgotten, a problem you solved several years ago, an improvement you made, or an area where you've developed expertise without thinking of it as an accomplishment. If you're struggling to remember examples, you can also ask AI what types of experiences might demonstrate a particular skill and use those examples to jog your memory.

The information still needs to come from you, but AI can help you figure out what information may be missing.

Make AI ask you the questions

One of the challenges with writing your own resume is that you're close enough to your work that important details can feel routine.

If you tell AI that you led the implementation of a new system, for example, ask it what else it would need to know before helping you develop that accomplishment. It may ask why the system was needed, who was involved, what role you played in the decision, what problems came up during implementation, and what changed afterward.

Your answers provide much stronger material than asking AI to "write a resume bullet about implementing a system" and expecting it to fill in the blanks.

This is also where having a resume structure helps. My Mid-Career Résumé Strategies Guide gives you a framework for developing resume content that you can provide to AI along with your own information, rather than accepting whatever format or writing style the tool generates.

Generic resume writing isn't an AI problem

I've been reviewing and writing resumes for about 15 years, and generic resume writing existed long before generative AI.

I could often tell when clients had previously hired a resume writer because the resumes used similar formatting, language, and phrasing. The document might have sounded professional, but there wasn't enough specificity to understand much about the person behind it.

AI makes it easier to produce that kind of writing quickly, but the underlying problem hasn't changed. A strong resume needs enough specific information to show what you know, what you've done, and how you've contributed.

The more information you give AI about your actual experience, the less it has to fill in the gaps with predictable language.

Use AI to improve your writing without handing over the story

Once you've worked through the substance of a position, AI can help tighten a long bullet, split information that has become difficult to read, identify repetition, or tell you where additional context would make an accomplishment stronger.

You still need to review the result for accuracy and make sure the language represents your actual level of involvement. AI can easily make something sound stronger while subtly changing what you did, particularly when it doesn't have enough information to work from.

Your resume also needs to sound like you. If the final document could belong to almost anyone in your profession, the fact that the sentences are polished isn't much of an advantage.

If identifying your strongest accomplishments or figuring out how to position your experience is the harder part, career coaching is where I work with clients on the career strategy behind the document rather than simply rewriting words on a page.

Use AI for a final review

After you've developed the individual sections, give AI the completed resume along with representative job descriptions and ask it to evaluate what the document communicates to a recruiter or hiring manager for that type of position.

You could ask what qualifications come through most clearly, where relevant experience appears to be missing, which sections are repetitive, what sounds vague, and what questions the resume leaves unanswered.

Treat that feedback the same way you would feedback from another person. Some of it may be useful, some may reflect a preference you don't share, and none of it automatically becomes a change you need to make.

I cover this AI process as part of a much larger conversation about updating an older resume in Resume Advice for Experienced Professionals: What's Changed and What Hasn't. The episode also covers ATS, tailoring, LinkedIn, two-page resumes, and how to decide what experience belongs on the document in the first place.

AI can help you compare information, ask better questions, retrieve experiences you've forgotten, organize your thinking, and improve your writing. What it shouldn't do is decide what your professional story is for you.

The strongest resume still depends on your ability to understand what you're trying to communicate and provide enough specific evidence to communicate it.

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Julia Toothacre, MS, is a career coach, strategist, and founder of Ride The Tide Collective. Through her Control Your Career methodology, she helps experienced professionals navigate career challenges, evaluate their options, and make informed decisions grounded in their individual circumstances, priorities, and goals.