Can recruiters tell if you used AI to write your CV?
Often, yes. AI-written CVs share a vocabulary and a rhythm that experienced recruiters notice, and the giveaway is usually vagueness where specifics should be. Using AI is not the problem. Use it for structure, ordering and phrasing, then make sure every claim, number and project detail is yours.
What gives it away
No single one of these proves anything. Together they read as a CV that was described to a machine rather than written by the person who did the work.
- Vocabulary that clusters. Spearheaded, leveraged, results-driven, passionate, seamless.
- Bullets of near-identical length and shape, each opening with a verb from the same short list.
- Achievements with no numbers, or with round numbers that turn up on everyone's CV.
- A summary paragraph that would fit any candidate in the field.
- Fluent, tidy prose that says nothing a stranger could not have guessed about the job.
Detection tools are not the real risk
AI detection tools are unreliable and produce false positives on ordinary formal writing, and most recruiters are not running CVs through them. The screening is done by reading.
The real check is the interview. If your CV describes a project in language you cannot sustain when someone asks about it for ten minutes, that is where it costs you.
Most employers do not mind the tool
AI-assisted writing is now common enough that most recruiters assume it. What they object to is not the tool, it is a CV that is generic or inaccurate, which is what you get from handing the whole task over.
Some applications ask directly whether you used AI, and some graduate schemes restrict it. Read the question and answer it honestly.
How to use it without the tells
- Give it your real material first. Dates, numbers, systems, team sizes, what broke and what you did about it.
- Let it handle structure, ordering and compression rather than content.
- Delete any sentence you would not say out loud in an interview.
- Keep the details only you could have written. A specific tool, an awkward constraint, an actual figure.
- Read the finished CV aloud once. The generic lines are the ones that sound like nothing.
How we do it
We rewrite your CV against a specific posting using the facts already in it, reordering and rephrasing rather than generating new claims. Your underlying CV stays the source of truth, so nothing turns up in a tailored version that you did not put there.
Updated 2026-09-06