A.I. flattens the story
A.I. Flattens Your Story
Everyone connected to an available job role uses A.I.: hiring managers, job applicants, and recruiters. This means all the opportunities for particular title sound the same, applicant resumes sound the same, and recruiters only see what’s made it through bot-gauntlet.
A few months ago, I asked a recruiter with 20+ years of tech-hiring experience if this made the job harder—a resounding “yes” along with a sigh of exasperation. Unfortunately, this means great candidates are overlooked.
But there are ways to differentiate your resume and break through the glut of noise:
Keywords in context: the ATS understands nuance and performs semantic analysis. Make sure to:
Always spell it out and then list the acronym, for example: Growth & Monetization (G&M)
Don’t stuff it with keywords as the system may penalize you
Show relevance in each bullet with story detail about a project or role—this is the process, trial-n-error, and approach used to solve the problem
Use a visually-clean layout: design is a language, yet for a resume it’s a minimalist format that accomplishes 3 things:
Permits you to include as much information as possible on those 2 pages amount
Makes it easy for how a human absorbs the facts
Doesn’t get in the way of how the ATS “reads” your resume
A.I. is a tool, not a replacement: You can use the GPTs or a specific resume analyzer, yet it’s important not to over-optimize for the machine.
Input your resume to see how likely it is to align with the job description
See if you can tease out actionable metrics and important story-like details that are important for the role
Check your keywords, but, and, yes, saying it again: don’t stuff your resume with keywords
I’ll dive deeper about what “your career story” means in another post, yet an easy way to think about it is that no two people have the exact same experience. Think of colleagues in the same role and at the same level as you—how different are your strengths and theirs? What about previous companies and project experience? What about personality and temperament? These are the pieces of your story that need to come through in every aspect of your career toolkit.
Ready to rebuild your story?
