Is AI or ChatGPT okay to write your CV with?
Artificial Intelligence has exploded onto the scene in the last couple of years, creating both opportunities and threats, yet in many cases, it has become a handy tool to aid productivity.
Matt Craven, founder of The CV & Interview Advisors, explores the pros and cons of using AI or ChatGPT to write a CV here, exclusively for Free-Work, and ahead of his free webinar for Free-Work readers today on optimising a CV for ATS.
Revealed: a growing concern of employers and recruiters
As many job candidates know by now, AI tools like ChatGPT can generate content for CVs, LinkedIn profiles and cover letters in seconds, with just a few keystrokes.
While these innovations are undeniably useful, what you might not know as a job board user is that there’s a growing concern among recruiters and employers that many CVs are being created using AI, not by the applicant’s skills, knowledge, commitment or craft.
Same old same old CV? It must be AI-generated…
And even more painful if you’re a hiring decision-maker facing a pile of CVs, AI tools churn out CVs that all look and read the same!
In this article, I will explore the pros and cons of using AI for CV writing and I’ll try to explain why Artificial Intelligence might not be the silver bullet you’re hoping for.
The case for AI (includes four ways ChatGPT can help with job board applications)
Let’s start with the benefits of AI for your CV, cover letter and the like because make no mistake, AI tools have their place in the job application process in 2025.
ChatGPT and its variants can help you:
identify ‘required skills’ in an online job advert
perform a personal ‘skills gap analysis’ against the job description
reword phrases that you’ve been trying to find alternatives for since yesterday
check grammar, spelling, and readability.
How to make your online job application hyper-targeted, ATS-optimised
I’m a big advocate of using ChatGPT to perform the ‘skills gap analysis’ between your existing CV and the advertised job description.
This is an incredibly useful exercise to make sure your job application is hyper-targeted and ATS-optimised. And if you don’t know what ATS is, you need to join my webinar in a few hours’ time!
The skills gap analysis using AI is so useful in our view as a CV and interview advisory that we even run a webinar on how job-seekers, IT contractors and other tech workers can use Artificial Intelligence in their job-seeking efforts.
But, when it comes to writing from scratch the showpiece of those efforts -- a CV -- AI has its drawbacks.
Do you know yourself, professionally? Good, because ChatGPT won’t…
Firstly, the output will only ever be as good as the input.
In my experience, job-seekers in tech and other sectors struggle to identify, never mind articulate their value proposition and how they have delivered ‘business benefits’ or ‘added value’ in previous roles.
Knowing yourself professionally and being able to sell yourself is far harder than writing a CV, and you can’t really start writing an effective CV until you’ve figured all that out first.
Where the AI darling struggles (cont.)
Think of it this way, if you struggle to articulate these important points in an interview, how are you going to prompt ChatGPT to include these yet-to-be-defined selling points in your CV?!
ChatGPT is great at phrasing things (although see my caveat, below), but the AI darling of the moment still can't define your unique professional worth. Nor can it elicit killer ‘selling’ points! YES, it can write a lovely sentence based on generic phraseology, but NO, despite its updates (we’re all waiting on ChatGPT version 5.0), the AI language bot can’t ‘figure out’ your unique positioning and value.
Personal brand and 'wow factor.' Good luck getting AI to tap into either!
AI is built on patterns and historical data, but it cannot inject personality or nuance.
In 2025, employers aren’t just scanning for keywords -- they’re looking for individuality and a sense of your personal brand, as well as evidence that you can deliver positive outcomes.
AI-generated CVs often feel flat and lack the ‘wow factor’ that grabs a recruiter’s or client-side hirer’s attention. It’s a bit like AI-generated music, it’s good-to-excellent at creating simple 4-chord pop songs, but it’s not going to invent a new musical genre. Not yet anyway!
Hallmarks of an AI-generated CV (aka beware the ‘elevate’ overload)
As any good (and honest) tech recruiter will tell you, AI-created CVs largely look the same and are written in the same style. They also use the same vocabulary.
In fact, what ChatGPT defaults to is a “US-resume” so that’s probably not terribly useful for job-seekers in the UK and elsewhere in the world.
Be aware if you don’t heed these warnings about using AI for your CV, there are certain words that ChatGPT overuses such as “elevate” that scream to those of us in-the-know, ‘ChatGPT-written-CV!’
Worse than an ChatGPT-created email? Probably…
There are other AI telltale signs too. Recruiters, hiring managers and ‘talent acquisition’ teams can today therefore spot a ChatGPT-created CV a mile off. It’s as obvious if not more glaring and shouts laziness even louder than emails written using AI!
If you are comfortable with conveying that sort of impression then you must have astonishingly ‘hot’ skills that the hirer just cannot refuse! But, for everyone else, if you want to genuinely stand out -- authentically and for the right reasons -- the only way is to NOT use AI for your CV’s composition.
AI for CV in a nutshell: a great tool, but no silver bullet -- nor a substitute for YOU
It’s fair to say that ChatGPT can do a pretty good job in creating CVs, and there's no doubt it has raised the bar when compared with some of the homemade CV horrors that many job-hunters still have, in the tech sector and beyond!
But nowadays, we have a scenario where many job-seekers can have a ‘pretty good’ ChatGPT-created CV, and in turn, that has created a scenario where recruiters and employers are negative towards them.
As mentioned earlier, we coach clients on how to use AI to aid their job-seeking efforts, so Artificial Intelligence most certainly has a place in the modern-day job-seeker’s armoury. But as much as ChatGPT is a great tool, it’s not a silver bullet, nor is it a substitute for your own brainpower and creativity -- at a key moment when a prospective client or employer wants to see both from you.
Moreover, language bots seem to be fast-becoming more of a hindrance than a help when professional job-seekers rely too heavily on AI to create a CV or resume.
How to optimise your CV to beat ATS: a webinar just a few hours from now!
Today, Tuesday January 14th, we are running a webinar on how to optimise your CV to beat the Applicant Tracking Systems (I was only teasing you earlier that I wouldn’t divulge what ATS stands for)!
In this free-to-join session, we’ll show you how to use AI to analyse a job description, but we’ll also show you a highly effective CV writing system that ChatGPT knows absolutely NOTHING about. You can register here: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/7130217901112970325
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