Trouble getting a phone screen? Fight AI with AI.
Looking for a new position and having trouble getting a call from a recruiter? The problem might not be you. It might be your resume's format. To fix it, you need to fight AI with AI.
During my recent job search, I used AI heavily on my resume—not to create experience I didn't have, but to make sure my real experience came through and, more importantly, made it to a human's eyes (more on that toward the end of the article):
I gave my existing resume to a couple of executive friends who really helped me take it to the next level (Chris, Michael—thank you). I'm eternally grateful for that help. However, I still wasn't getting noticed from the applications I submitted. I turned to Claude and asked it to help make my resume stronger for a human recruiter while keeping it honest, accurate, and tied to my actual experience. Specifically, I asked it to:
- Help me make my resume shine while still staying true to my experience and background.
- Reformat and rewrite my resume to make it visually appealing and truly informative using highly relevant keywords a recruiter would want to see.
- Generate a punchy executive summary block for the top based upon my background, work history, and major achievements.
- Edit it down to two pages, keeping the most important and highest-value experience while removing duplicative or lower-value content.
Claude gave me a revised version, and I gave that version to ChatGPT with the same instructions. I hand-tuned the result. I used the $20/month paid plans for both tools because I wanted access to the better models and higher reasoning limits. For me, turning them to the max my plan allowed was worth it.
At that point, I had a resume that looked good to me. Strong content. Clear story. Good executive summary. Relevant keywords. Two pages. Clean formatting. I turned it into a PDF.
That is where things got interesting.
After Claude and ChatGPT reviewed the resume for content and I made the appropriate changes, I gave Claude a request to review and parse my PDFed resume like an automated applicant tracking system would. I had (more than) a few rounds of back and forth, but to save you the trouble, here's a good canned prompt that will look for a lot of the issues that appeared from my efforts:
This is my PDF resume. Pretend you are both a new and an antiquated HR applicant tracking system, both with and without AI capabilities. Review my PDF resume for anything that would trip-up parsing by an ATS, including, but not limited to, paragraph structure, tabular structure, multiple columns, oddly-formatted regions, confusing font ligatures, and anything else you think a parsing and processing engine would stumble upon. Also review the resume for ATS-friendly keywords, section headers, and other standard terms that ATS systems use when processing, scoring, or ranking resumes for review by a human reviewer.
What came back surprised me. My resume looked good to a person. To an applicant tracking system, it was an absolute mess.
I had a skills section arranged in three clean columns. Claude flagged that an ATS might read the terms out of order, mash them together, or turn them into nonsense.
My font choice looked good visually. Once exported to PDF, it created ligature characters where certain letters blended together. That can confuse parsing engines and cause keywords to disappear. I had no idea this type of thing even existed; visually it looked normal. To an older ATS, a highly relevant keyword became a nonsensical set of characters.
Claude also flagged structural issues around section formatting and hierarchy that could make the resume harder for an ATS to interpret. I fixed those issues, regenerated the PDF, and gave it to ChatGPT using the same criteria.
ChatGPT found a few different problems Claude missed, so I fixed those too.
Because I'm apparently the kind of person who turns resume formatting into a contact sport, I went back and forth a few more times with both tools until they basically came back with: this is good, the section headers are standard, the keywords are clear, and there is nothing obvious here that should trip up an ATS.
Here is the damning reality: if your resume confuses the automated systems, your resume may get downgraded and a human recruiter will never see it.
You could be the best thing since sliced bread and Claude’s Mythos model. If your resume cannot communicate that in both human-readable and machine-readable ways, your application may still end with the familiar automated email:
“Thanks for your application, but we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.”
AI is already part of the hiring process. Use AI on your side of the table too. Use it to clarify your story, tighten your resume, test whether your PDF is actually parseable, and find where your formatting is working against you.
The goal is to make sure the system does not accidentally erase you before a person gets the chance to evaluate you.
First published on LinkedIn.