Everyone has an opinion about your CV — recruiters, ex-colleagues, even coaches — and it can make your brain fry trying to decide what advice to follow and what to ignore. Now there’s the “opinion” of AI too.
I often see CVs that have followed AI’s advice too closely. They look polished, but they’re generic. The individuality has gone, and with it a clear value proposition about what the person actually brings.
When you’re working on your CV, start with you, not AI. There are two foundations that will help you stand out.
- The Big Challenge
What was the big challenge of each role and what did you do to address it?
This helps you frame your experience in terms of the problems you solve, rather than listing responsibilities. It builds depth and credibility.
Example:
The Strategic Challenge:
- Tasked with revitalising a mature, low-growth consumer category and a portfolio of long-established but declining brands, with minimal marketing investment and limited margin for error.
- Led a £255m RSV portfolio.
Turning Strategy into Impact:
- Repositioned core brands around clear, distinctive propositions, enabling renewed relevance with modern consumers and opening up new audiences and routes to market. Resulting in the brand regaining its number 1 position in the category.
- Unlocking Value Across the System
Partnered with R&D and manufacturing teams to deliver over £2m savings from within the supply chain, whilst delivering innovative new product extensions.
- Unlocking Value Across the System
- Maximising Impact with Limited Investment
Pioneered sustainable cocoa sourcing, securing category partner status with major retailers and protecting brand value through cost-optimised recipes.
This example has been anonymised, but it illustrates how you can structure experience on a CV in a way that shows judgement, impact, and leadership — not just activity.
- Identifying what you uniquely bring
A helpful start point can be the people you worked with. I ask my clients to go back to colleagues – past and present and ask:
- What are my greatest strengths? Can you give an example of when I used them effectively?
- Where do I add the greatest value to an organisation or role?
- How do I make things happen?
- If you were going to pitch me for a role, how would you ‘sell me’?
One client received the following feedback – ‘She has “off the charts” interpersonal and people skills. She is the glue that holds a team together and has the ability to connect with people on any level. That is a very rare skill. She’d be equally happy talking to an investor, a C suite exec, a journalist, a tech expert or junior employee. She connects with anyone very quickly and more than that people want to do things for her because of it.’
Firstly, this kind of feedback gives confidence boost at a time when it my be most needed. Secondly, we translated it directly into her CV profile:
The glue that holds teams together. Combines exceptional interpersonal skill with the ability to connect across hierarchy and expertise, building trust that translates into influence and action.
This feels unmistakably her and uses language which helps her standout.
Once you have crafted your CV using these two foundations — the strategic challenge you were solving and what you uniquely bring — AI can become genuinely useful. But only at this point.
Used well, AI can help you professionalise your CV, pressure-test it, and sharpen your language. Used too early, it will flatten your experience and dilute your voice.
What follows are ways to use AI as an editor and sense-checker, not as the author.
How AI Can Help — Without Taking Over
- Checking the balance between what and how
A strong CV shows both:
- what you delivered (outcomes, scale, numbers)
- how you delivered it (leadership, influence, ways of working)
AI can help you check whether this balance is coming through clearly.
AI prompt: “Review this CV and identify where outcomes (the ‘what’) are clear and where ways of working or leadership (the ‘how’) could be strengthened. Suggest light edits without changing the voice.”
- Sense-checking your key message
Before AI, I used to get my clients to share their CV with a trusted person for 2 minutes and then ask them ‘what were your key takeouts about me from this CV?” This allowed us to check whether we had the message right. AI can now help us do this in seconds.
AI prompt: “Based on this CV, what types of roles would this person be a strong fit for? What seniority level does the language suggest?”
If the answer doesn’t match the roles you’re targeting, that’s valuable data. It may mean you need to:
- elevate the language
- make your scope clearer
- or be more explicit about scale and influence
This is particularly important if you’re aiming for a step up rather than a lateral move.
- Pitching your language at the right level
One of the most common pieces of advice I give clients is to calibrate their language for the level they’re targeting. Most people dust off an old CV and add experience — but senior experience needs to be articulated differently.
Senior roles need to show:
- impact across the organisation
- leadership through complexity
- influence across the wider ecosystem
AI can help you check whether your language is pitched appropriately.
AI prompt: “Rewrite this section to reflect impact at [Head of / Director / Executive] level, while keeping the original meaning and tone.”
Use this sparingly — you are looking for calibration, not transformation.
- Checking alignment with a specific role
AI is very effective at spotting gaps between your CV and a job specification. It is a great start point if you have your CV already done and are actively looking at different roles.
AI prompt: “Compare this CV with the attached job description. Where is there good alignment, and where are there gaps, I may need to address or make more explicit?”
This supports tailoring without rewriting your CV from scratch each time.
- Keywords and clarity (not keyword stuffing)
Keyword stuffing is when we are trying to do the right thing, but inadvertently ‘stuffing’ our chances, by making us sound like a carbon copy of the job description, it can help you get through the AI first stages of the application process but will fail once it gets to a person, as your unique value proposition is not clear .
However, AI can help ensure you are not missing obvious language, particularly for online applications, without erasing your value proposition.
AI prompt: “Identify key skills and terms in this CV that align with ATS systems, and suggest where clarity could be improved without adding jargon.”
The goal is readability and accuracy — not gaming the system.
What AI Should Not Do
AI should not:
- decide your value proposition
- invent achievements
- strip out distinctive language
- replace reflection and judgement
If your CV sounds like anyone else’s, it won’t do its job.
The most effective CVs still start with you: your judgement, your choices, your impact. AI works best when it comes after that thinking — not instead of it.
A strong CV doesn’t just describe what you’ve done. It communicates how you think, what you’re trusted with, and why you make a difference.
Use AI to refine and reflect that story — not to write it for you.
Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash
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