Job hunting is repetitive, demoralising admin wrapped around a few moments that really matter. AI is good at the admin and bad at the moments — which is a more useful split than most advice about it offers.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Pasting the job advert in and asking for a cover letter.
What comes back is fluent, structured, generic, and instantly recognisable. Recruiters read hundreds of these now. The phrasing is distinctive in exactly the wrong way: *thrilled to apply*, *proven track record*, *uniquely positioned*, three paragraphs that could describe anyone.
Worse, it optimises for the wrong thing. A cover letter's job is to say something true and specific that your CV cannot. A tool that knows nothing about you cannot supply that, so it fills the space with structure instead.
If the tool wrote the content, it is generic. If you wrote the content and the tool tightened it, it is yours.
That distinction runs through everything below.
Where it genuinely helps
Understanding what a job advert is really asking
Paste the advert in and ask what the role actually involves, which requirements are essential versus aspirational, and what someone would be tested on at interview.
This is straightforwardly useful. Adverts are written in a code that people who write adverts understand and applicants often do not.
Working out whether to apply at all
Give it the advert and a summary of your experience, and ask where the genuine gaps are and whether they are disqualifying.
Ask for the honest version. Told to be encouraging it will be, which helps nobody. This is one of the few places where asking it to be sceptical produces something more valuable than asking it to be helpful.
Turning your experience into the right words
Not writing your CV — translating it. You describe what you did, in your own plain words, and ask for it phrased in the language of the sector you are moving into.
This is genuinely valuable for career changers, where the problem is rarely the experience and usually the vocabulary.
Getting the boring parts done
Reformatting a CV for a system that mangled it. Cutting a long paragraph to fit. Adjusting emphasis for a different role. Filling in the fourth application form that asks the same questions in a different order.
This is the bulk of the time cost of job hunting, and handing it over frees you to spend real effort on the applications you actually care about.
Interview preparation
The strongest use of the lot, and the most underused.
Ask for the fifteen questions most likely to come up for this role. Then answer them out loud. Then paste your answer in and ask what is weak about it, what a sceptical interviewer would push on, and what you left out.
You get unlimited, patient, low-stakes practice. That is the thing most people cannot get elsewhere and it is what interviews actually reward.
Where it hurts
- Cover letters written from scratch. They read as templated because they are.
- Anything invented. Never let it add a responsibility, tool or achievement you did not describe. It will if you leave room. That is a lie on an application, whoever typed it.
- Filling in "why do you want to work here?" If you cannot answer that yourself, that is information about the application, not a gap for a tool to fill.
- Live interview assistance. Increasingly detected, increasingly asked about directly, and catastrophic when caught.
- Volume applications. Fifty generated applications perform worse than five considered ones and cost you more time in total.
Two things worth knowing
Applicant tracking systems are less magical than the internet claims. Most parse your CV into structured fields and let a human search it. A clean, standard layout with the words the advert actually uses is most of the advantage. Anything about hidden white text or keyword stuffing is either outdated or a way to get discarded.
Assume your application may be read by AI too. That is a reason to be specific and concrete rather than to write for a machine — specific detail survives both readers, and vague keyword soup fails both.
A workflow that works
- Paste the advert. Ask what the role really is and what they will test.
- Ask where your experience genuinely falls short. Decide whether to apply.
- Write your own first draft badly and quickly, in your own words.
- Ask it to tighten, shorten and remove anything you did not tell it.
- Read it aloud. If a sentence is not something you would say, cut it.
- Practise the interview against it until your answers are boring to you.
Steps three and five are what keep it yours. How to write a prompt that actually works covers step four in more detail, and why AI gets things wrong is worth reading before you trust anything it tells you about a company or a salary band.