Hey Reader,
I've been helping people with their CVs and cover letters for years. It's something I've been doing even more since starting the Recruitment Room.
So I wanted to test something.
How far can AI actually take an application?
Not lazy, copy-paste AI. I’m talking about a properly built version of my own voice. I’ve fed it hours of my call transcripts, so it genuinely writes the way I talk. Same phrases, same rhythm, same tone.
Then I pointed it at a CV and a cover letter to see what it produced.
It was good. And it still wasn’t right.
The draft came back fast and it read well. But the closer I looked, the more I had to fix.
It made small factual slips, claiming things that weren’t quite true. It used for clichés I would never say. It had lines that sounded like a robot, not a person. And even with my own voice style, parts of it read like AI. Polished, but not me.
And your CV and cover letter should be a representation of you.
Where AI actually helps
I’m not telling you to avoid it. I use it constantly.
It’s brilliant for getting started. For beating the blank page, organising your thoughts, sharpening a sentence you’ve already written.
It’s also useful for something people overlook: keywords. Plenty of clubs and recruiters now run applications through software that scans for specific words and criteria before a human ever reads them. AI is good at checking your CV actually covers the language a role is asking for, so you don’t get filtered out before you’ve even been seen.
As a thinking partner and a checker it can be useful.
What it can’t do is be you.
It doesn’t know which detail from your career actually matters to that club. It can’t tell a real achievement from a line that just sounds good. And it has no idea what your voice sounds like, unless you bring it.
The bar has shifted
A couple of years ago, using AI at all was an edge.
Now everyone’s doing it, and people can tell. A hiring manager reads enough applications to spot the ones nobody actually wrote. Generic, tidy, and completely forgettable.
People let AI write the whole thing, send it off, and wonder why they never hear back. The tool didn’t fail them. They outsourced the part that was supposed to be theirs.
It catches up with you
There’s a quieter problem too.
AI reaches for words and phrasing you would never use. On paper, you might not notice. But if you reach the interview, the person across the table will.
They’ve read your cover letter. Then they meet you, hear how you actually talk, watch how you present your work, and something doesn’t add up. The application and the real person don’t match.
That gap plants a doubt. Did they even write this themselves? Trust is hard to win back once that question is in someone’s head.
Your CV gets you in the room. How you communicate keeps you there. They have to sound like the same person.
So here’s how to actually use it
Use AI as the assistant, not the author. Here’s the order I’d do it in.
- Bring the substance first. Don’t ask it for a CV. Start with your real experience, the specific work, the results, the details that matter for this role. Nothing real goes in, nothing real comes out.
- Get it to interview you. This is the one most people miss. Don’t ask AI to write about you, ask it to ask you. Give it the role, then have it interview you with specific questions about your experience. Your answers become the raw material, in your own words, from your actual career.
- Feed it the job advert and pull the keywords. Get it to list the words and criteria the role asks for, then make sure your CV genuinely covers them. That helps you get past any screening software, as long as every one of them is actually true for you.
- Use it to be specific about you, not invent things. Let it organise, structure and sharpen what you’ve already given it. The moment it starts adding claims you didn’t make, stop.
- Make it sound like you. Read every line back. If it isn’t how you’d actually say it, rewrite it until it is.
- Check it’s true, and that you’d stand behind it in a room. If application-you and interview-you wouldn’t match, fix it now, not in the interview.
People need to know about you, from you directly. AI can't do that all on it's own.
You’re still the one who has to make it yours.
That’s the bit you can’t skip.
Liam