There is a new problem landing on recruiters’ desks. Resumes and CVs are getting better. That sounds like good news, but there is a catch.
ChatGPT and other AI tools can now take an average resume and turn it into a polished, professional, keyword-rich document in seconds.
They can rewrite your profile, strengthen your achievements, improve your grammar, tailor your experience to a job description, and make almost every candidate sound impressive.
The problem is that when everybody sounds impressive, nobody sounds particularly impressive. Recruiters and hiring managers are increasingly faced with resumes that use similar language, similar structures, and similar claims about leadership, transformation, growth, and results.
The resumes may look better than they did five years ago, but seeing the difference between candidates has actually become more difficult.
Thanks to AI, the glory days of headhunting are back!
AI has raised the standard of resume writing
I am certainly not against using AI to help write your resume. Used properly, it is an excellent writing assistant. It can find weak language, remove repetition, improve structure, suggest stronger wording, and help you explain complicated responsibilities more clearly.
There is, however, a big difference between using AI to improve how you communicate your experience and asking AI to create the entire presentation of your career. When you let AI do too much of the writing, your resume risks sounding like the other 200 resumes competing for attention.
You have probably seen these three meaningless claims everywhere. They are superficial, generic, and say absolutely nothing about the candidate’s particular function, industry, or actual achievements. Please do NOT follow suggestions like these:
- Do not say “Strategic and results-driven executive with a proven track record of driving transformational growth.”
- Do not say “Dynamic leader with extensive experience delivering operational excellence and sustainable business performance.”
- Do not say, “Visionary executive skilled at building high-performing teams and driving stakeholder value.”
It all sounds impressive until you have read essentially the same thing another 30 times.
Your perfect resume may be hurting your chances
Before generative AI came into our world, resume quality varied enormously. Some were excellent, some were terrible, and most were somewhere in between.
You could often hear the candidate’s own voice in the document. The wording might not have been perfect, but the career story felt individual and personal.
When every CV looks perfect, nobody stands out.
AI has changed this. Give an AI tool a job description and your existing resume, and it can produce a beautifully tailored document filled with the right terminology and keywords.
This creates a strange situation for recruiters and hiring managers. The overall quality of resume presentation improves, while the ability to distinguish one candidate from another becomes worse. A polished resume is therefore becoming less powerful as evidence that somebody is genuinely exceptional.
AI has made resumes better; that is the problem
For years, candidates have been told to put the right keywords into their resumes (and LinkedIn for that matter). That remains sensible advice. If you are a CFO, for example, your resume should contain the terminology that goes with your actual experience. If you have led M&A, ERP implementation, restructuring, regional finance, IPO preparation, treasury, or investor relations, of course say so.
The difference today is that AI can identify those keywords almost instantly. Upload a job advertisement together with your resume and ask an AI tool to tailor the document for the position. Within seconds, it can identify which terminology the employer appears to value and suggest where you should use it.
Keyword matching can therefore tell me that your resume matches my search. But it cannot tell me whether you are good at what you claim to do. At senior management and C-suite level, that distinction matters enormously.
Personal details make your resume stand out
If AI makes generic executive language easy to produce, specific personal details become increasingly important.
Do not simply tell me that you “drove business growth.” Tell me instead that you grew revenue from THB 800 million to THB 1.4 billion in three years across five offices in Southeast Asia. Do not tell me that you “led a high-performing team.” Tell me that you managed 420 employees at manufacturing plants in Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
Similarly, do not tell me that you “successfully transformed operations.” Explain what was wrong, what you changed, how long it took, and what happened to productivity, cost, margin, customer satisfaction, or employee turnover. The more senior you are, the more I want to understand the scale and context behind your claims.
ChatGPT can improve your Resume & CV. It can also make you invisible.
Those details make your story yours. Your numbers, business size, decisions, challenges, markets, reporting lines, responsibilities, and measurable results are far more difficult to turn into generic AI language without losing something important.
Employers have a problem too
Employers should pay attention to this development because AI-generated resumes do not create challenges only for candidates and recruiters. If you rely heavily on applications and resume screening, you may increasingly find yourself comparing documents that have all been professionally optimized for your vacancy.
Twenty candidates can appear remarkably close to your job specification. That does not necessarily mean you have twenty equally qualified candidates. It may simply mean that you have twenty well-presented documents.
This becomes particularly important when recruiting senior executives. At C-suite and senior management level, context matters enormously. A title alone tells you very little. Managing Director of what size company? Regional responsibility for which countries? P&L responsibility of THB 100 million or THB 10 billion? A team of 15 employees or 1,500? Growth from what starting point?
These questions cannot be answered through keyword matching.
Thanks to AI, good headhunters matter more than ever
This is one reason proper headhunting and executive search remain relevant despite advances in AI. Our job cannot simply be finding resumes. Technology can already do a lot of that, and it will become increasingly capable.
AI can find resumes. Headhunters find people.
The value of executive search comes from identifying the right people in the market, including executives who have not applied for anything, understanding their actual career history, approaching them discreetly, assessing their relevance, challenging their claims, and establishing whether their achievements stand up to detailed questioning.
References become more important. Reputation becomes more important. Market knowledge and assessment become more important. Experienced interviewing becomes more important. When almost anybody can create a beautiful resume, the beautiful resume itself tells you less than it used to.
This is also why I remain skeptical when people suggest that AI will simply replace experienced executive recruiters. AI can help us search, research, organize information, summarize interviews, and improve productivity. I use it myself. But somebody still needs to establish whether the impressive executive story on the screen is supported by the person sitting on the other side of the interview.
