Diagnosis · resume / CV
Why your resume sounds like AI wrote it
Recruiters do not flag a resume for sounding formal. They flag it for sounding empty.
A resume is already bullet-shaped, so headers and hedging are not the tell. What flags a resume as generated is the abstract-verb bullet with no number attached: a duty stated as an action with nothing counted underneath it. A model reaches for the verb because it has no number to report. The fix is not tone, it is arithmetic: attach a real number to every claim you can.
Why this happens to resume / CV in particular
A resume is the one surface where bullets, bold job titles, and terse fragments are the correct format, not a tell. A hiring manager moves through a stack of these in one sitting and expects the shape. That is why the formatting checklist that catches a chatbot in an email or a blog post mostly comes up empty here. What a model does instead is fill each bullet with an action verb chained to an abstraction, because a resume prompt gives it a job title and a vague sense of duties but no dollar figure, headcount, or percentage to report. A verb-plus-abstraction bullet is what you get when there is nothing underneath a line to count. A resume with real numbers in most of its lines almost never reads this way, model-written or not.
The tells that show up here
Not every AI tell appears everywhere. These are the ones that cluster on this surface, and what it is about the format that produces them.
- not-only-but
- Resume bullets often hinge two claims into one sentence, a duty paired with a virtue, so a single task reads as two achievements, because the model is padding a line that has no metric to fill it.
- testament-family
- A resume bullet with no number under it sometimes reaches for language that treats leadership or vision as the achievement itself, in place of the figure it does not have. Swap that abstraction out for the missing number and the sentence either produces a fact or falls apart, the same test every other unnumbered bullet on this page fails.
- vague-attribution
- A resume's opening summary line occasionally borrows the same move a blog intro uses: a claim backed by an unnamed study, or an editorial nod to research nobody involved could name. It is the identical sourceless-citation pattern this tell catches everywhere else, just moved to the top of a resume instead of a blog post's opening paragraph.
- greylist
- Leverage, streamline, robust, and drive show up in resume bullets because they let a sentence sound like an achievement while describing a routine task.
Before and after
A generic AI draft on the left. On the right, the real output of running that draft through underslop, checked so it adds no name or number the draft did not already carry. The voice is The Operator, flat and itemized
Spearheaded a dynamic team of cross-functional professionals to drive impactful, results-oriented growth initiatives. Leveraged robust strategic thinking to streamline workflows and unlock operational excellence across the organization. This achievement stands as a testament to strong leadership and a collaborative mindset. Passionate about not only delivering results but also fostering an innovative culture where teams are empowered to thrive. A proven track record of driving results in fast-paced, dynamic environments.
Led a cross-functional team through growth initiatives that produced real results. I focused on making workflows simpler and operations tighter across the board. The numbers back it up: strong leadership and a willingness to collaborate got it done. I care about results, but also about building a team culture where people do their best work and aren't afraid to try new things. My track record shows I can deliver in fast-moving environments.
How to fix it yourself
- Find every bullet with no number Read the resume top to bottom and mark any bullet built entirely from a verb and an abstraction: managed, drove, spearheaded, leveraged, streamlined. If the sentence would be equally true whether the work went well or badly, it has no number in it.
- Attach a real number to what you can For each marked bullet, add the count, dollar figure, percentage, headcount, or time saved that the work actually produced. If you do not know the number, find it before you send the resume, from a manager, a system export, or your own notes.
- Cut the bullets you cannot fix A bullet you cannot attach a number to is not doing work for you. Cut it rather than dress it up further. A shorter resume with five countable lines reads stronger than a long one with fifteen vague ones.
- Read it back as a stranger who screens a stack of these in one sitting Read only the numbers and nouns, skip every verb. If what remains still tells the story of what you did, the resume is carrying its own weight instead of the adjectives around it.
Questions
Is it bad if my resume sounds like AI?
Not automatically. Screening software rarely penalizes tone on its own. The real cost is a human reader moving fast through a stack of resumes, who slows down only for the ones with a specific number in them. A resume that reads generic gets the same quick pass as every other one in the pile.
How do I make my resume not sound like AI?
Find every bullet built from a verb and an abstraction and attach a real number to it: dollars, percent, headcount, or time. A resume that reports numbers in most lines reads as written by the person who did the work, whether or not a model touched the sentence structure.
Can employers tell if your resume was written by AI?
Not reliably from tone alone, because resumes are already terse and bulleted, which hides most of the formatting tells that give away AI writing elsewhere. What a careful reader notices instead is the absence of anything countable, which reads as a resume nobody could verify.
What are red flags on resumes?
A duty stated with no result attached, a virtue claimed with no evidence, a superlative with no number behind it. None of these prove a model wrote the line. They prove the candidate has not yet turned the job into a claim a reader can check.
Why does my resume say it's AI-generated?
Some scanning tools flag resumes for uniform sentence structure or repeated verb choices, not for actual authorship. If every bullet opens with the same verb-plus-abstraction shape, a scanner and a human reader notice the same pattern for the same reason: nothing underneath it varies.
This page explains the cause. underslop is the edit: paste up to 500 words on the free tier, and it marks the tells it could not remove. Your text is held for 0 seconds.