How to make your resume not sound like AI: 7 fixes that work

Younger job seekers are rewriting their applications because they know two filters now sit between them and a job: an AI screener and a skeptical human. Greenhouse’s research found younger applicants are far more aware of AI screening than applicants over 60, and they are trying to look both human and impressive to software at the same time.

Greenhouse’s chief people officer, Sharawn Tipton, summed up the mood bluntly, saying “neither side thinks hiring is working.” Applicants feel their applications vanish, while employers wade through polished CVs that read alike. In the same survey, 97% of job seekers said they wish they could show an employer something that doesn’t fit on an application.

AI interviews add another layer. In that UK and Ireland survey, 42% of candidates had done an AI interview in the past year. A separate Greenhouse report on AI interviews put the figure at 63%, up 13 percentage points in six months, and found 70% of those candidates weren’t clearly told beforehand that AI would judge them.

Your resume probably sounds like AI if it is smooth, generic and oddly perfect. When Resume Genius asked hiring managers what gives an AI resume away, these were the most common answers:

• Strange tone or phrasing (51%): sentences that sound fine but not like a real person.
• Bland, repeated wording (44%): the same safe phrases in every section.
• Buzzword-heavy writing (41%): terms like “results-driven” or “proven track record” with nothing behind them.
• Inflated or vague claims (41%): big promises with no numbers, names or outcomes.
• Flawless grammar with no variety (39%): every bullet the same length and rhythm.
• Formatting habits like em dashes (32%): punctuation many people rarely type themselves.
• Wrong or irrelevant details (27%): facts the chatbot made up or pulled from the job ad.

Resume Genius career expert Eva Chan said the problem isn’t that these resumes are worse. They are often too similar, missing “a real person behind the words.” In the same survey, 77% of managers said many resumes they see now look AI-generated.

The best way to make your resume not sound like AI is to use the chatbot as an editor, never as the author. These steps come straight from what hiring managers and recruiters say they look for.

1. Write a rough first draft yourself. Asking a chatbot to “write my resume” produces the same phrasing it gives everyone else. Start with your own notes on each job, then ask AI only to tighten them or pull keywords from the job ad.
2. Delete the buzzwords. Search your document for filler such as “excellent communication skills,” “results-driven” or “proven track record”. If a phrase could sit on anyone’s resume, cut it or prove it.
3. Replace claims with evidence. Instead of “managed complex projects,” name the project, the size of the team or the result. Recruiters want an action, the context and the outcome in each bullet.
4. Tell one small story per role. LHH North America president Nicole Gable has pointed out that AI can claim you have a team mindset but can’t explain how you built it or what it achieved. A single concrete example does that job.
5. Read it out loud. If a line doesn’t sound like something you would say in an interview, rewrite it. Vary sentence length so it doesn’t sound machine-even.
6. Check every fact and number. Chatbots invent plausible figures. Anything on the page is fair game in an interview, so only keep numbers you can back up.
7. Match your cover letter to your voice. A slick AI cover letter next to a plain resume, or the reverse, is a mismatch recruiters notice, and it gets harder to keep up once you are sitting across from them.

Sounding human doesn’t mean ignoring the software. Resume Genius found 71% of hiring managers say their company uses an applicant tracking system (ATS), the software that stores, sorts and filters applications, and 19% use AI to deliberately weed out applications before a person sees them.

The top reason resumes get filtered isn’t AI-sounding text. It’s missing the skills the job asks for (42%), followed by not meeting basic requirements (36%). Generic or AI-heavy content was flagged by 28%, the same share as a lack of relevant keywords. So the goal is both: use the job ad’s real terms for skills you actually have, then write the surrounding sentences in your own words.

File format matters too. Hiring managers said plain text-based PDFs (53%) and Word files (43%) work best with their systems, while only 13% said image-heavy, design-led layouts play well with their ATS.

Yes, as long as it supports your work instead of replacing it. Hiring managers are split on what AI use says about a candidate. In the Resume Genius survey, 72% said leaning too hard on AI makes an applicant seem less skilled, yet close to six in ten also saw it as a sign of adaptability, and 51% read it as efficiency.

Good jobs for AI include spotting typos, suggesting stronger verbs, summarizing what a company does and pulling keywords out of a job description. Bad jobs include inventing achievements, writing your summary from scratch and making up metrics you never tracked.

One wider caution: AI screening is not neutral. Stanford research looking at four million applications run through an AI screening tool found Black and Asian candidates were at a disadvantage in many assessments. That is one more reason to make sure a human-sounding, specific resume reaches the person behind the software.

No. The same giveaways apply wherever you apply. In the US, a resume is usually a short one or two page summary. In the UK and Ireland, a CV plays that same role, and Canadian employers use both words. The Greenhouse findings on AI screening come from UK and Irish job seekers, while the hiring manager data comes from the US, and both point the same way: specific beats polished.