By J.M. Auron, Expert IT Resume Writer—The Best IT Resume Writing Services for More than 15 Years.
This is a pretty timely question. Most things you'll read tend to split about evenly between "Yes! AI is amazing! Use it!" or "AI is terrible! Evil! A threat to humanity! A career-ending mistake! Never use it!"
I've thought about AI resumes a lot. In fact, I've thought about AI a lot. And I'd like to take a few minutes to give a more nuanced answer—so that you can make the best decision for your resume, and your career.
In this article, I'm going to go through some cases where an AI resume may actually be the better choice than other alternatives—particularly resume mills or DIY.
However, I want to be clear from the outset that "better than a resume mill" isn't saying much, and that in a very competitive job market, an "ok resume" may not do the job—or help you get one. I'll return to this at the close of this article.
What I've Been Seeing
I've seen a number of AI-generated resumes in the last year or so, and, as with all resumes, there's a range. I've seen some AI-generated resumes that were absolutely terrible, and I've seen some that I had to describe as "not bad." What I mean by that is that they were relatively well written, relatively well formatted, and followed the resume best practices I learned when studying for my ACRW certification.
Now, that's not high praise. But consider the alternative.
When an AI Resume May Be the Better Choice: AI Versus Resume Mills
As an IT resume writer, I've been fighting the resume mills for a decade and a half now.
It ain't easy.
The resume mills have massive marketing budgets, and get high rankings—and a heck of a lot of revenue—turning out some pretty bad products.
I know. I've talked to enough clients who've spent $100, $200, $500 (or more) on the resume mills, and gotten something that wasn't usable—a document likely to do more harm than good in a job search.
I've seen the resumes churned out by resume mills for fifteen years. I can spot them a mile away. They are, and forgive me for being blunt, generally terrible. Resume mill resumes are usually poorly formatted, badly written, breaking the most basic rules of proper resume structure and style.
Until recently, these were produced by off-shored subcontractors making something less than a pittance—which meant they had to be pumped out fast. That's at least part of the reason for the low quality. Now, though, I suspect that with many resume mills you pay a couple of hundred dollars, they run it through their own AI, and hand you a result you could have gotten on your own for free.
Compared to those resume mill resumes? The AI resumes I've seen were generally significantly better. They were—with a couple of notable exceptions—clearer, better written, and more properly formatted.
Bottom line? There's no reason to spend a couple of hundred dollars on what the mills deliver. There never has been, given the quality—but now it makes even less sense. AI resumes, while having clear limitations I'll get to in a moment, are better and cheaper.
When an AI Resume May Be the Better Choice: You Really Hate Writing
Me? I love writing. It's my main talent, and I find real joy in putting together a great sentence, a great paragraph, or a great story.
This is not, however, common—nor is it common among my clients. While there are exceptions, it's unusual.
And even I don't look forward to the prospect of writing my own resume. I'd rather write ten resumes for clients than write my own.
So if I don't want to write my own resume—and I've been writing resumes full time for more than fifteen years—you really shouldn't feel badly about not being excited to sit down and write yours.
That's because resume writing is a very distinct form of communication, with different rules and standards, many of which aren't widely known. It can be a difficult, time-consuming process—and one that may not produce stellar results even when you put in the work.
So if writing your resume is going to be a stressful chore that may not produce great results, AI may be a better—though not perfect—choice. It'll be faster, probably less stressful, and may well produce a clearer, more readable document.
The Risks of AI Resumes
Having talked about the possible advantages of an AI resume, I have to talk about the downsides.
They're considerable.
Let's start with one risk that has actually decreased in the last year: easily identifiable AI writing.
AI writing is a lot less obvious than it was. A year ago, it was pretty easy to spot AI copy—and not because of myths like the em-dash—which I have used, do use, and will continue to use. I, and most people with a halfway decent eye for writing, could spot AI copy a couple of miles away. I think that's changed. There are definitely times I'll see something on LinkedIn that's obviously not written by a human. But with the resumes clients have sent me? I haven't always been sure. I've thought they might be AI, but the copy didn't announce itself the way it once did.
So the risk that a hiring manager will immediately flag your resume as AI and dismiss it is lower than it was—though the risk is still real, and it varies with the hiring authority. Some would rather look at a genuinely bad resume written by a human than one written by an LLM.
The Bigger Risk
The bigger risk with an AI resume—and this is honestly a risk with any resume not built through a real, interactive process—is lack of depth.
The "not bad" AI resumes I've seen did tell a story. But when I sat down and interviewed those clients, I realized that the story on the resume wasn't the story of the person I was talking to. The resume described a career—but, unfortunately, not my client's career.
The interview revealed a person—with a specific value proposition, a clear thread connecting fifteen years of decisions, and accomplishments that AI had either missed entirely or rendered generic.
This disconnect is something I've seen in DIY resumes, too. But it was more pronounced with the AI versions, and the gap was larger between resume and candidate.
That's a real problem. Because if you get an interview based on a resume that is, essentially, describing someone else, it's not going to go well.
Why Career Introspection Matters
A resume requires real introspection—a genuine ability to look at your career and understand your actual value proposition, the main threads that tie your work together, what makes your story worth reading.
That's not an easy task. None of us see ourselves or our careers as clearly as others might. That's why having an external partner asking the right questions—digging into what you actually accomplished and why it mattered—can produce a much stronger document than any process you do alone.
LLMs can, in some measure, do this. But I'll still give the edge to human experience and intuition when it comes to drawing out the most critical information.
The Bottom Line: "OK" Really Isn't Good Enough
Yes, an AI resume may be better than what you'd write yourself. It's almost certainly better than wasting money with the resume mills.
But in a market like this one, that's not going to be enough.
There have been tech markets where companies were desperate for talent—where recruiters would reach out to candidates with incomplete or mediocre resumes because the skillset was rare enough to overlook the presentation. That's not the case now.
Now? Your resume has to tell your story in a way that's accurate, compelling, concise, and specific to you. In other words, it has to be really, really good.
Maybe an AI can do that, with enough time, prompting, and revision. I can only say that I haven't seen an AI resume that strong cross my desk yet.
In a competitive market, a B-level resume is a significant risk. The question is whether you're comfortable taking it.
A Word or Two on My Relationship with AI
A couple of years ago, I was about the most anti-AI guy out there. When the frenzy was really starting to peak, I was posting things like "Has anyone else actually SEEN The Terminator?"
Then I started using an LLM—initially for fairly straightforward questions. I'm a curious person, and being able to get an answer to "Is the final ayin pronounced in Syriac?" saved a lot of time. (Yes, I actually asked that.)
But I started to find that LLMs have a much broader value. I have a synthetic mind—I put things together rather than pull them apart—and an LLM that can follow those connections and engage with them seriously has become, surprisingly, a genuine intellectual partner. Claude has become invaluable to my philosophical studies—and, somewhat less romantically, to my ongoing struggles to satisfy the almighty algorithm that has life-and-death power over my business.
I include this to be clear: I'm no longer the anti-AI guy. The technology has real value. It just has real limitations too—and when your career is on the line, those limitations matter.
If you're interested in exploring how an experienced human can help you get the best possible resume?