Look, using AI is not the problem. Talking from a professional, career-boosting angle, the challenge is how to properly use AI in CVs.

If you can’t be careful with your own CV, why would any recruiter trust you to be careful with their company’s projects? Exactly. So consider this your no-BS guide to using AI tools the smart way when building or updating your CV for a tech role.

AI tools are not created equal: use more than one

First things first, different tools do different things, and using just one is like showing up to a hackathon with only a rubber duck.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s worth having in your toolkit:

• ChatGPT: solid for drafting, restructuring, and getting a first version out of your brain and onto the screen.
• Claude: better for tone consistency and catching logical gaps in your narrative.
• Grammarly: catches the surface-level stuff. Think of it as the final proofread you never do at 2am.
• Kickresume: great for visual templates and cover letters.
• Teal: suggests the right keywords based on the job description. Bonus for the control freaks out there: it also generates a mini CRM to help you track and manage all your applications. Yes, really.
• Zety: gives you content suggestions based on what you already have, which is perfect when you know something’s missing but can’t put your finger on what.

Don’t be loyal to a single tool, stack them, combine them, and use them for a better final result.

Feed it with a lot of context, not just your CV

This is where most people go wrong. They paste their CV, type “make this better,” and then wonder why the output sounds like it was written by a bored intern on a Friday afternoon. Let’s avoid that.

Give the AI the full picture, the job description you’re targeting, your seniority level, the specific role, the company if you have it. The more context you provide, the less generic the output. Treat it like briefing someone who knows nothing about your background.

Use AI to better articulate what you’ve done

A lot of people in tech are brilliant at what they do but struggle to put it into words. If that’s what you do (totally normal, by the way) here’s a way to make it better.

Describe your last project in plain, messy language. Don’t overthink it, just dump it. Something like “I built a thing that connects to the API and pulls data and then my team used it to do reports faster” is more than enough to work with. Then ask the AI to turn that into a structured, impactful bullet point.

The key step that most people skip but you won’t after this article: fact-check every single line the AI produces against what you actually delivered, this is essential. Recruiters are really good at spotting inconsistencies during interviews so if your CV says you “led a migration of a microservices architecture serving 2M daily users” and you actually helped test one service… that conversation will surely be awkward.

Don’t just polish your CV, tailor it

Don’t get us wrong, polishing is great but tailoring is what actually gets you the interviews. For every single application, paste the job description into your AI tool of choice and ask: “Which parts of my CV are least relevant to this role, and what’s missing?”

That one question can turn a generic, catch-all CV into a more focused application in under ten minutes. That’s the real competitive advantage AI gives you.

Finally: review the final output

We saved the most important one for last, because sometimes it needs to be said: review the final result before you send anything.

The number of CVs that land in our applications still containing sentences like “Let me know if you’d like me to improve this further” is, frankly, alarming. This immediately tells the recruiter on the other end that you didn’t bother to read what you sent them.

AI is your co-pilot, not your ghostwriter

Used well, AI can genuinely level up your job search helping you articulate your experience better, tailor your applications faster, and present yourself more clearly to the people who matter. But, it only works if you stay in the driver’s seat.

The best CVs we see are the ones where you can tell a real person used AI as a tool, not a replacement for thinking. Your experience is yours, like your story is yours, AI just helps you tell it better.

Now go update that CV (and send it our way) there are some pretty good tech jobs waiting for you.